


scars and stars

by Patomac



Category: Original Work
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Enemies to Lovers, F/M, Fate, Fate & Destiny, Light Fantasy, Magic, Red String of Fate, Rivals to Lovers, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, Soulmates, Urban Fantasy, Witchcraft, Witches, academic rivalry, and there was only one bed, but you'll like it i promise, that's a spoiler
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-19
Updated: 2019-11-06
Packaged: 2020-10-21 12:31:21
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 20,706
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20693573
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Patomac/pseuds/Patomac
Summary: The soulmark on Ivy's arm is equal parts gift and curse. It pulls her toward the community of witches she's always longed to embrace, while setting her apart. Half-longing for her promised soulmate-- and half-dreading his arrival-- Ivy finds that her fate threatens twists she couldn't possibly have foreseen.





	1. Chapter 1

_Soulmates aren’t the ones who make you the happiest, no. They’re instead the ones who make you feel the most. Burning edges and scars and stars. Old pangs, captivation and beauty. Strain and shadows and worry and yearning. Sweetness and madness and dreamlike surrender. They hurl you into the abyss. They taste like hope._

_Victoria Erickson_

i

“You didn’t tell me you were getting a tattoo!”

Ivy looked up from her chemistry textbook, fork hovering in the air halfway between the cup of ramen and her lips. “What?”

“Your tattoo,” Natalie said. At Ivy’s blank look, she reached across the table and turned Ivy’s arm over. A bold mark, about half the size of a grapefruit, stood out on the side and top of Ivy’s forearm. It was vaguely circular with a mass of geometric lines arrayed in a symmetrical pattern that looked almost like a mandala.

“When did you get it?” Natalie asked. “And, more importantly, why didn’t you take me with you?”

Ivy stared at the mark on her skin with a sinking sensation. She was positive it hadn’t been there this morning. Well, almost positive. Maybe like 50-50.

It definitely hadn’t been there last night, though, when she’d gotten out of the shower.

Natalie snapped her fingers, breaking Ivy’s reverie. “Hello?” she said. “Earth to Ivy.”

Ivy’s gaze snapped up to Natalie’s. “Sorry,” she said, “tired.”

“Tired from staying up all night to get a tattoo?” Natalie prodded.

“Sort of,” she hedged.

Natalie gave her a flat look. “Were you in a tattoo parlor last night or not?”

“Not,” Ivy said. She returned her gaze to her arm. God, what were the odds that it was temporary? They had to be pretty good, right? People didn’t just develop weird tattoos on their skin overnight. Not even people who happened to be witches.

Ivy was, unfortunately, all too used to lying to Natalie. To lying to everyone. So she went with her stock excuse, provided by the notorious figure of one extremely eccentric relative.

“My aunt did it,” Ivy said. She forced herself to take a casual bite of her ramen and swallow. “She’s experimenting with some sort of plant-based ink. Like henna.”

Natalie turned Ivy’s arm over. “The colors are really cool,” she said. “It’s sort of like a shimmery-metallic effect.”

It really was. The mark on Ivy’s arm had a delicate, gentle color gradient; it shifted from deep indigo to blue to green and finally to an effervescent gold at the edges, the color of freshly-poured champagne.

“Do you think she’d try one on me?” Natalie said mischievously.

Ivy choked on her last bite of ramen. “You know my aunt,” Ivy said. “Let’s make sure my arm doesn’t fall off first.”

Natalie’s laughter rang through the cafeteria.

***

Ivy’s aunt Celinda lived on the south side of town in an aging bungalow. Fifty years ago, it had been the height of mid-century modern architecture; the smooth, nearly flat roof blended perfectly into the faint rise of the hill beyond it. Mounds of earth scattered through the front yard lent credence to the illusion that the house was just another large hill. Herb gardens stretched between them, brimming with sage and thyme and yew. A particularly aggressive patch of mint spilled out of the beds to do battle with the grass lining the walk.

The haphazard garden plan only added to the illusion of natural splendor in the heart of Detroit. Eccentric or not, notorious or not, Aunt Celinda was a fixture at the local garden club. A welcome one, too.

Ivy didn’t bother knocking at the door. She simply let herself in. The scent of lemon and coriander greeted her like an old friend. “Aunt C? Are you here?”

In response, an enormous ginger tabby cat drifted out of the shadows. He wound around Ivy’s ankles, purring softly before pawing at her knee.

She glared at the cat. She’d been a victim of its claws before. “I am nowhere near stupid enough to pet you.”

The cat meowed, a touch mournfully, before slinking off towards the back of the house. Against her better judgment, Ivy followed it. The murmur of voices drifted through from her aunt’s kitchen.

“Deacon, I’m telling you, an infusion of rosewood isn’t going to solve the problem,” Celinda said. “It’s a curse not a love spell.”

Deacon’s response came out muffled. In response, Celinda barked a laugh. “You wily dog, you! Not a chance, lovie. Not a chance.”

Ivy turned the corner to the kitchen, a bright yellow room dripping with afternoon sunlight. Plants hung suspended from pots fixed to the ceiling with wire. Vines trailed from their corners, giving the room the odd impression of a green roof.

Celinda stood in front of a black cauldron that would have made the witches of Macbeth turn green with envy. Three pairs of reading glasses were perched on top of her head. Wispy red curls escaped from under the frames, frizzing to all sides like a vast cloud.

The image of a man’s face was projected above the cauldron in glittering blue light. Wicked amusement gleamed in his eyes. “If you change your mind,” he said in a rich voice.

“Cad,” Celinda said. But her smile matched the man’s.

Ivy cleared her throat. Celinda wheeled around to face the doorway. Her eyes lit up at the sight of Ivy leaning against the doorjamb. “Blossom! I didn’t expect you today!”

“I noticed,” Ivy said. Her eyes flicked to the man projected above the cauldron.

Celinda’s pale cheeks displayed a furious blush. She turned back to the cauldron. “Try the mugwort and get back to me.”

“I await our next meeting with bated breath,” Deacon said.

Celinda’s lips twisted in a cross between a smile and a scowl. Without another word, she swiped her hand through the smoke, dissolving the image to faint, colored steam.

A fond smile tugged at Ivy’s lips. “I still think Facetime is easier.”

“Hush, you.” Celinda ran a hand over her wispy hair, trying and failing to restore it to order. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

In response, Ivy shrugged off her jacket. She held her bare arm out to her aunt. “What’s this?”

Celinda’s eyes widened. She crossed the kitchen in quick, short strides and pulled a pair of reading glasses down over her eyes. “Fates below! Where on earth did this come from?”

“How should I know? It just… appeared.”

Celinda reached for Ivy’s arm and turned it over. “Have you cast any interesting spells of late, dear? Something experimental, perhaps?”

“I leave the experiments to you, Auntie,” Ivy said, a touch ruefully.

Celinda’s lips pursed. She ran a finger along the tattoo, her touch light. “Remarkable.”

“Do you know what it is?”

“I think so.” Celinda reached for another pair of eyeglasses and set it neatly over the first pair.

Ivy waited. And waited. And waited. “Well…”

Celinda grasped Ivy’s hand tightly. She stared up into Ivy’s face, her eyes twice their normal size behind the two pairs of glasses. “_Vestigium animatum_.”

Ivy’s brow furrowed as she tried to work out the Latin. “A soul… mark?”

Celinda nodded. “Indeed.”

Ivy couldn’t help but feel that this was just another test she was failing. “And that is…”

“Ivy! Honestly, blossom, it’s in your magic book! Don’t you ever read the thing?”

“Sure I do. When I’m looking for spells or antidotes—”

“When you’re looking to cause trouble.” Celinda dropped Ivy’s hand and crossed the room, leaving the kitchen behind for the warm, cozy study. Bookshelves lined three of the four walls from floor to ceiling and all of them, every one, was full.

Celinda wound her way through the maze of worn furniture and neatly plucked a book off a shelf. At only an inch wide, it was much thinner than Ivy’s personal magic book which weighed more than some small children. “When you get home I want you to read this,” Celinda said, brandishing the book at Ivy. “All of it, don’t just skim.”

“Yes, Auntie,” Ivy said. She fanned the pages out before her. The paper was still crisp. Modern. “I don’t suppose you’ll give me a preview of coming events?”

Celinda’s stern look faded, replaced by a small, tentative smile. “Sit down.”

Ivy took her usual seat in the stuffed armchair by the lone window. She expected her aunt to take up her usual seat behind the desk, but instead she plopped herself down on the ottoman. Her fickle tabby cat jumped up onto her lap.

For a long moment, Celinda just looked at Ivy. Her fingers stroked the cat’s fur in deep, even motions. The sound of purring vibrated through the room.

“A soulmark,” Celinda said, “is something a witch gets when she has a soulmate.”

Ivy blinked. “A what now?”

“A soulmate.” A dreamy look surfaced in Celinda’s green eyes. “Someone who’s uniquely matched to you. Who complements you in every way. A true companion.”

A loud, rushing sound filled Ivy’s ears. “A boy?”

“Possibly,” Celinda said. “It could be a woman as well.”

Ivy’s cheeks flushed. “I don’t… that is to say…”

Celinda’s usual snort was tempered by the kind, almost wistful expression in her eyes. “It’s not necessarily a lover, blossom. Frequently that is the case, but not always. Your soulmate could end up being your best friend.”

Ivy chewed the inside of her cheek. “So it could be Natalie?”

“Natalie is not a witch, my dear,” Celinda said. “Besides, I suspect you’d already know if a tattoo to match yours appeared on her arm.”

A little flare of alarm shot through Ivy. “My soulmate has the same mark?”

“They have the other half of it,” Celinda said. She extended her hand, and Ivy reluctantly scooted forward and surrendered her arm to further scrutiny.

When Celinda’s examination passed cursory and into detailed, she broke the silence. “Do you have a soulmark, Aunt C?”

Celinda looked up. “No,” she said, a touch sadly. “Most people don’t. There are a lot of theories on that—spiritual, psychological, etc. We won’t get into that. Suffice to say that having one makes you very, very special.”

She released Ivy’s arm. Ivy stared at it with increasing dread. “I don’t believe in soulmates.”

Celinda chuckled. “Ivy.”

“What? It’s true. The idea that there’s only one person meant for me, one person in the entire world, is revolting.”

“It’s romantic,” Celinda said.

“This coming from you? The scientist?”

Celinda gave Ivy’s hand a little pat. “You don’t have to believe in it now, blossom. But some day, when you least expect it, your soulmate will stumble into your life. And you’ll believe then.”

Ivy raised her eyebrows. She was just supposed to wait around for Prince Charming? Ugh. “Can I get rid of it?”

“It’s a part of you,” Celinda said. “You can no more get rid of your soulmate than chop off a limb. And don’t get any ideas.”

Ivy scowled at her. “Yeah right. Like I’d cut off my arm to get rid of a tattoo? Please, it’s not that bad.”

“That’s the spirit,” Celinda nudged the cat off her lap and stood. “The book is the most recent study published on the _animatus_ phenomenon. Read it, Ivy. Cover to cover.”

Ivy sighed and cracked it open. “Yes, Aunt C.”

***

For once, Ivy followed Celinda’s advice and read the whole book. Twice.

From the moment she’d first heard the world ‘soulmate’ her mind had gone into overdrive. What did it even mean to have a soulmate? What would that person—if he or she really existed—be like? Kind? Tall? Funny?

What did Ivy even want in a best friend? In a lover?

The word brought strange flutters to Ivy’s chest. She’d never been particularly popular; after all, she had the town eccentric as both beloved aunt and devout tutor, and her time for socializing had dwindled down to nil. Still, she was a teenage girl; she’d watched couples strolling through the halls of her school, arms linked. She’d seen kisses exchanged in the parking lot up against minivans and beater cars. She hadn’t been part of it, not now, but she’d hoped for it one day.

Now she might have it. With someone who was, allegedly, perfect for her.

The thought flooded her with anticipation. With terror. With hope. Because now that she knew she had a soulmate, she couldn’t stop looking for him. She couldn’t stop peering around corners, hoping he’d be there. On public buses, in shopping malls, even on trips to the store, she was always looking at forearms, hoping that her soulmate, whoever he was, would pop out and say hello.

He didn’t. And Aunt Celinda had a theory as to why.

“Well, it’s obvious, isn’t it?” she said as she moved around her front room, watering the vast array of foliage gathered there. “Soulmarks are found on witches. Exclusively. And there aren’t many to choose from around here.”

Ivy bit her lip. “But if there aren’t any witches, how will I meet him?”

“I wouldn’t worry about it, ivy blossom,” Celinda said, with a faint smile. “If it’s fate, it’s fate. He’ll make his way into your life eventually.”

But eventually wasn’t good enough for Ivy. Which was how she found herself at the kitchen table one Thursday morning well before the sun rose.

Ivy lifted her pen, and the words on the paper flashed red before melting away. As she watched, a new question appeared on the yellowed surface, scrawled as if by some invisible hand.

_Winterbourne Academy is a close-knit learning environment. What qualities or skills do you feel will make you an asset to our campus community?_

Ivy chewed on her pen cap thoughtfully. If this were a normal college application, she might have talked about her extracurriculars; she’d been on the JV soccer team, and she’d never missed a meeting of the Spanish club. But somehow she didn’t think that kicking a ball and eating nachos would impress an admissions director at a school for witchcraft.

Ivy’s mother strolled into the room, heels clicking, and Ivy jumped. She flipped the application over and put her hand on top of it. “Mom? What are you doing up?”

“Good morning to you, too,” Beth said, reaching for the coffee grounds. She scooped a handful into a filter before she turned to the coffee pot and realized that it was already full.

She stared at it for a moment. “You’re drinking coffee?”

Ivy shrugged.

A suspicious expression stole over Beth’s features, replacing the sleepy one that had been there moments before. She turned around, studying Ivy. “It’s 6:00 in the morning. What are you doing at the kitchen table surrounded by books?”

“I couldn’t sleep.”

“So you made coffee.

“Isn’t that what people do in the mornings?”

Beth crossed her arms.

Nerves prickled at Ivy’s spine. “Look, Mom. It’s not a big deal. I just had a lot of homework.”

“Homework,” Beth repeated.

Ivy jabbed her pen at a book.

Which was a mistake, because Beth drifted over to the table to peer at the book in question.

“Herbert’s Herb Lore,” Beth read aloud.

Ivy flushed.

“Are you up in the middle of the night working on something for your aunt?”

“No!”

“We’ve talked about this, Ivy. School comes first. Then you can mess around with whatever… witchiness Celinda prescribes you.”

“It’s not for Aunt C,” Ivy said. “It’s just a—”

She broke off when she realized her mother’s gaze had snagged on the paper. The paper which, seconds ago, had been blank.

And which now read, in letters that flashed between black and red, _You have not completed question three. Please do not attempt to move onto question four before completing question three._

Ivy’s eyes widened in horror. She reached for the paper—but her mother was quicker. She snatched it off the table.

Beth read. For a long time. In silence.

“It’s not what you think,” Ivy said.

“I think it looks like an application,” Beth said, “for a very particular kind of school.”

Ivy winced. She’d spoken to her mother about transferring schools just once, three years ago. Her mother had shut her down so quickly that Ivy’s head still rang from the shouting.

This time, however, the yelling didn’t come. Beth set the paper down on the table in front of Ivy and took a seat in the chair next to her.

She surveyed her daughter over the books. “Where is this Winterbourne Academy?”

“Vermont, somewhere,” Ivy said. “It’s very rural.”

“It would have to be, wouldn’t it?”

The barb in her mother’s words stung. Ivy turned her head away. “Mom…”

Beth sighed. “I’m sorry, Ivy. It’s just… I don’t like this. I’ve never liked it.”

“I can’t help what I am.”

“I know that,” Beth said. “And I don’t blame you, sweetheart. I don’t. It’s just that there’s this whole world you’re a part of that I can’t know. That I can’t share with you. And I hate that.”

“I’m sorry. Believe me, I’m sorry. It’s just… I can’t stay here anymore. At a normal school with normal people. I’m not normal. I’m a witch. And for once in my life, I need to be around witches. Around witches other than batty Aunt Celinda.”

Beth was silent for a long moment. She settled her hands on the table, pressing them flat. “Does this have anything to do with that mark on your arm?”

Ivy grasped it with her free hand. She’d spent hours studying the marks in the past few weeks. She’d copied them onto paper, trying to replicate the colors exactly. It had been impossible; no ink she had could match the shimmering soulmark.

When Ivy said nothing, Beth sighed. “Your aunt told me what it was. Some sort of marker. To connect you to someone.”

Slowly, Ivy nodded. “She says… she’s says it’s a soulmark. I have half of a tattoo that someone else has as well.”

“Your soulmate.”

Beth’s voice was flat. Ivy furrowed her brow, looking down at the table. “I know you don’t believe it.”

“It is rather unbelievable, isn’t it?”

Ivy reached for one of the books stacked on the table. It was the slim volume she’d borrowed from Celinda weeks ago. The clean, crisply printed pages were now worn at the edges. Dog-eared and bookmarked and underlined.

She passed the book to her mother. “This is the research,” she said. “Everything witches know about the mark on my arm.”

“And you trust them?”

“I trust science. Observation, experimentation…”

“I trust science, too,” Beth said, and the meaning in her words was firm.

Ivy’s bottom lip trembled. “Just because you don’t understand it, doesn’t mean it isn’t real.”

“Oh, I know,” Beth said with a dark laugh. “But that doesn’t make me hate it any less.”

Ivy folded her arms over her chest. “I want to be a part of it. I have to be a part of it.”

“Because you have to find this boy?”

“Because I have to find people like me! I have to find people who understand what it’s like!”

A heavy silence settled over the table. When Ivy looked up, she saw tears shining in her mother’s eyes. “I love you, Ivy.”

The ice around Ivy’s heart cracked, and the first tear slipped down her cheek. “I love you, too, Mom.”

“I don’t want to lose you.”

“You won’t.”

“I will, though. If I don’t let you go to this school, you’ll resent me for it. Forever.”

Ivy looked up in shock. “What?”

Beth smiled through a sheen of tears. “I don’t want you to go away, Ivy. But I know that you need to. I know what it’s like to be the outsider. To feel that you can never fit in. I never wanted that for you.”

“Mom…” Ivy whispered.

Beth shook her head. The tears finally fell, and she stood up, crossing around the table to wrap Ivy in a hug. “I love you, Ivy. And I want you to be happy. So if you want to go to a school for witches, that’s where you’ll go.”

A lump formed in the back of Ivy’s throat. “Are you… are you sure?”

Beth nodded. “I’m sure.”

She drew back then, wiping her eyes. With a final ruffle of Ivy’s hair, she strode out of the room.


	2. Chapter 2

ii

Ivy curled up on her brand-new comforter and propped her chin on her knees. Out the window, the hulking silhouette of Winterbourne Academy rose above lawns that, in day, had been vibrantly, almost supernaturally green.

“I can’t believe I’m here,” Ivy said.

Her roommate, Denise, looked up. Her nose scrunched up, twisting her freckles into a new, endearing shape. “You waited long enough to start.”

A deep, abiding sadness lodged in Ivy’s gut. “My mom didn’t want me to come.”

This time when Denise’s nose crunched, it wasn’t quite as cute. “She was human?”

“She is human,” Ivy said. “She’s not dead or anything. She just… changed her mind.”

Denise raised her eyebrows. She stuffed a shirt into a drawer and came to sit next to Ivy on the bed. “I’ve never met anyone half before. How did you learn about magic? Did your dad teach you?”

The simple question opened another wound. A faint, hazy memory of a tall man with broad shoulders and laughing eyes surfaced in Ivy’s mind before she shoved it away.

“My aunt taught me,” she said.

“It must have been hard.”

Ivy tilted her head, considering. “Going to normal school and learning magic wasn’t a lot of fun.”

“Oh my God, I bet it wasn’t.”

“Double the homework,” she and Ivy said at the same time.

The girls exchanged a smile, and slowly, hesitantly, something in Ivy’s chest relaxed.

“I know I’m going to be behind,” Ivy said. “But I’m still excited to be here. To be learning.”

“I’m glad you’re here, too,” Denise said. She hopped up off the bed and returned to her suitcase. “Wait till tomorrow, I’ll introduce you around.”

“Thanks,” Ivy said. “That’d be great.”

“No problem,” Denise frowned around for a moment before she spotted something on Ivy’s side of the room. “Hey, hand me that brush, would you?”

Ivy grabbed the hairbrush in question from the nightstand. She stood up and walked it over to Denise. “Do you think your friends will like me?”

“Of course they will. They’re all—”

Denise broke off.

Ivy’s skin prickled. “Denise? Is there—is there something wrong?”

Denise’s mouth opened and closed, but no sound came out. She pointed at Ivy’s arm.

Ivy glanced down. Her soulmark stood out even in the dim lighting, shimmering gold and green.

“You have a soulmark,” Denise said, in a half whisper.

She squashed the urge to reach for her sleeve and roll it back down. “Yeah,” she said, setting the brush down on Denise’s bed. “My aunt called it something else. Vestigio, Vestifrum…”

“_Vestigium Animatum_,” Denise said. That half-whispered, reverent tone still hadn’t gone away.

“Right,” Ivy said. “That.”

Denise was still staring at Ivy’s tattoo. Ivy turned, then, reaching for the edge of her blanket and pulling it back. “It’s no big deal,” she said, in a nonchalant tone that she didn’t quite feel. “I bet a bunch of people around here have them.”

Denise shook her head, sending her river of brown hair into agitated rapids. “They’re really rare. I’ve never met somebody who had one.”

“Oh,” Ivy said.

Denise took a hesitant step forward and then stopped herself. “Can I… can I look at it?”

Ivy shrugged. “I guess.”

Denise sat down next to Ivy on the bed. She leaned closer, peering at the skin of Ivy’s arms. In the year since she’d gotten it, it hadn’t changed a single bit. It looked as fresh and as vibrant as the day it had appeared on her arm.

“Look at the colors,” Denise said, still whispering.

“I’ve seen them.”

Denise looked up, then. A blush spread across her cheeks. “Sorry. It’s just…”

“I know.” Ivy heaved a sigh. “I’m weird.”

“Not weird,” Denise said quickly. “Special.”

“I’m not sure I want to be special.”

“But why? The thought that you have a soulmate… it’s amazing, isn’t it? Mesmerizing?”

“Scary,” Ivy said.

Denise raised her brows.

Ivy shrugged. “I’m not sure I like the concept of having a soulmate. Of having only one person I can be happy with. What if he’s an asshole?”

“Ivy!”

“What? I don’t know who he is. Or who she is. All I know is that there’s somebody else out there with _this_ on their arm.”

Ivy waved her arm in the air.

Denise shrugged. She heaved her suitcase off her bed and rolled it to the closet. “Suit yourself. But I bet that when you find the person with the mark, you’ll be in love at first sight. You just wait.”

As it turned out, Ivy’s roommate was something of an unrepentant gossip, and by the next day, the entire campus of Winterbourne Academy knew about her mark. Students waylaid her in the halls to ogle it between classes and stopped by Ivy’s table to introduce themselves and ask questions.

Ivy was used to being a sideshow—something about being the only witch in a human high school did that to a person, even if that person was trying to hide her magic—but to her surprise, she didn’t mind the circus. Sure, the soulmark—and its potentially terrifying consequences—were the true attention grabber of the day, but everyone who came to gawk spoke to Ivy, too. By the end of the day her head spun with a mixture of names and faces and dorm rooms where, shock of all shocks, she was welcome.

“See?” Denise said, as they walked back to their room at the end of the day. “It’s not so bad.”

It wasn’t. By week’s end, Ivy had heard about twenty stories, some rumor and some first hand, about people with soulmarks. All of them ended happily, whether in marriage and babies or a lifelong friendship that followed its participants all the way to the grave.

More importantly, to Ivy at least, the people who sought her out, telling tales of second cousin’s and great uncles’ and ‘my sister’s wife’s best friend’s mom’s first husband’ stayed long enough to become friends. In a month, her social circle was twice as big as it had ever been in the human world. She spent her days in classes at Winterbourne and her nights curled up in one of the dorms’ common rooms, playing cards or listening to music or just hanging around doing nothing at all.

It was a good life. A fulfilling life. Until it all changed.

Winterbourne Academy was a traditional school; from its grounds, steeped in over two hundred years of history, to its uniforms, complete with requisite black-pointed hats, it breathed ritual and custom into the air, along with the magic perpetrated by its young pupils.

The witch community, on the other hand, was small. Small enough that, given the advent of television and movies and many witches in close residence with human neighbors, certain customs of human high school life managed to make their way onto Winterbourne’s stodgy, storied grounds.

Ivy slapped the paper down in front of Denise. “We’re having a dance?”

Denise practically bounced in her chair. “We are! Isn’t it exciting?”

Ivy raised her eyebrows. Exciting. Nerve-wracking. It was definitely something.

She couldn’t help the glance she threw over her shoulder at the boys’ crew team, clustered around their usual table. Trent Morgan was at their center, tall and blond and almost obnoxiously fit from all those mornings he’d spent rowing up and down the Blue River on the outskirts of campus.

Denise saw it. Because of course she did.

“Do you think he’ll ask you?”

A knot dropped into the pit of Ivy’s stomach. “I don’t know who you mean,” she said.

Denise’s eyes twinkled. “Of course not.”

Ivy set her tray down with a thump. “And I suppose Declan already asked you?”

Denise’s smile held the promise of secrets. “Not yet,” she said. “But he will.”

He did. And as the rest of Ivy’s friends found dates, Ivy found herself growing decidedly anxious. She’d liked Trent for months—since he’d told her a story about Great-Aunt Somebody who’d married the man who bore the twin to her soulmark. They shared a cauldron in their potioneering class, and Trent did a bit about pretending to ingest poison that never failed to make Ivy laugh. They’d spent the week before midterms studying late into the night, camped out in Ivy’s dorm’s common room until the house mother kicked him out.

He had to know she liked him. He had to. Didn’t he?

One afternoon, between beginner spellcasting and introduction to energy transfer, Ivy decided she couldn’t take it anymore. She cornered Trent on his way to the library.

“Areyougoingtothedancewithanyone?”

The words came out too fast, barely distinguishable as words. A puzzled frown formed between Trent’s brows as he tried to figure out what Ivy had said. “No?”

Ivy’s face was on fire. She forced herself to take a deep breath. “Do you want to go with me?”

The frown vanished, replaced with a smile. The kind of broad, warm, Trent smile that made Ivy’s heart give a little thump. “Okay,” he said. “Sounds great.”

And it was. Ivy bought a dress, and did her hair, and borrowed some of Denise’s makeup, and, by the time seven o’clock rolled around on Saturday, she looked as pretty and feminine as she could possibly manage.

Trent’s expression as she walked down the stairs made it all worth it.

“You look beautiful,” he said, as he pinned a corsage to her dress.

They danced in Winterbourne’s huge ballroom, a space which typically was used to perform duels and try out particularly testy spells. Tonight, though, gentle music drifted from speakers set high on the wall, and the Winterbourne uniforms—black as always—had been replaced by a riot of color in the form of the girls’ dresses.

Trent was a perfect gentleman. An annoyingly perfect gentleman, if Ivy were being honest. He brought her punch and held her arm and danced at a perfectly respectable distance. Still, his smile was warm, and every time his hand brushed against the small of Ivy’s back, she felt it all the way down to her toes.

They slipped out into the academy’s gardens just before midnight.

The cool night air and the moonlight filtering through the clouds above cast a spell over Ivy’s nerves. The scent of night-blooming jasmine entwined around her, powerful and strong, calling to something deep within Ivy’s heart.

Trent’s arm was warm under hers, and she leaned closer to his body, sniffing for the sharp scent of aftershave she’d come to associate with him.

He looked down at her. “Are you cold?”

She shook her head, and then reconsidered. “A little,” she said. “But it’s nice. It was getting hot in there.”

“I don’t think the ballroom’s really meant to accommodate that many people.”

“Ballroom.” Ivy snorted. “I can’t believe I go to a school that has a ballroom.”

“It’s weird, isn’t it?” Trent flashed Ivy a grin. “But then, what about our school isn’t?”

He led Ivy to a bench at the edge of the gardens overlooking the lake. She sat down amidst blooming rosebushes. Trent sat next to her, arm barely brushing her own.

The silence stretched as infinite as the dark glass of the lake. “Thank you for taking me,” Ivy said. “I’ve had a nice time.”

“Me too. Even though I may have lost a toe.”

Ivy’s face immediately flushed red. “I said I was sorry! Give me a break, I can barely walk in these heels!”

Trent pressed a hand to his chest in mock solemnity. “It’s a price I pay to escort a lady as lovely as you.”

Ivy shoved his shoulder. “Get out.”

Trent grinned.

Ivy stared at him. At the crisp line of his jaw. At the sharp slope of his nose. At the curve of his lips that always, always seemed to be smiling at her.

She was moving before she even thought about it. Before she could consider doing anything else.

The kiss was sweet. A brief brush of lips. Trent tasted of the punch they’d drank inside.

When he pulled away, the smile was gone from his lips.

“Ivy,” he said.

She stared up into his eyes. Green and, just moments ago, sparkling with mischief. Now, the joy had fled from them. There was trepidation. Fear. Regret.

A wave of cold shot down Ivy’s spine. She sat up straighter. “Trent? What’s wrong?”

He raked a hand through his hair. “Nothing. Everything. I…”

He broke off, staring into the night.

Ivy looked down at her lap. Tears pricked at the back of her eyelids. “I’m sorry if… if you didn’t want to,” she said. “I just thought…”

“Ivy,” Trent said. She lifted her chin to find him looking at her. “I did want to. I still want to.”

Ivy’s heart gave a sharp, almost painful throb. “Okay,” she said. “Then what’s wrong?”

Trent’s eyes brimmed with sadness. “I, you… we can’t.”

Ivy felt her brows draw together. “What?”

Trent shook his head. “I like you, Ivy. I want to kiss you. I’ve wanted to kiss you for months. But we can’t.”

“Yes, we can. Here, I’ll prove it to you.”

She leaned towards him, pressing her lips to his. The sensation sparked across Ivy’s nerves like wildfire. Her hands twitched at her sides.

Trent broke away. This time his voice was stern. “Ivy.”

“What? You like me, I like you. I want to kiss you. What on earth is the problem?”

“That is the problem,” Trent said, nodding towards Ivy’s arm.

It took her a moment to follow his gaze. To see the tattoo on her arm—the soulmark. It shimmered in the moonlight, its deep indigo laced through with sparkles.

“You don’t like the mark?”

“It’s not the mark. It’s what it represents. Ivy, you have someone out there waiting for you. A soulmate. I can’t kiss you. I can’t be with you. It feels wrong. Like cheating.”

“Cheating?” Ivy said. “You can’t cheat on someone you’ve never met!”

“That… that’s not what I meant,” Trent said. “That didn’t come out right.”

“The person wearing the other half of this may not even be a boy! It may be a girl. A friend!”

“Do you know how rare that is?”

“As rare as having a soulmark in the first place,” Ivy said. “Clearly I’m a champion at beating the odds.”

Trent was already shaking his head. “I can’t, Ivy. I want to, but I can’t.”

She sat back then, cold despite the warmth radiating from Trent’s body, still just inches away. “This is why you didn’t ask me to the dance,” she said. “Why no one did.”

“Don’t take it personally. It’s not about you.”

“No, obviously it’s about this.” Ivy raised her arm, shoving the soulmark under Trent’s nose. “This thing. This mark. This… scarlet letter.”

“Ivy,” Trent said.

“Don’t.” She stood, and the skirts of her gown swirled around her legs like a tempest. “Just don’t.”

She fled the ball like Cinderella into the night.


	3. Chapter 3

iii

_four months later_

Natalie peered over Ivy’s shoulder at the thin slip of paper printed in blue type face. “Damn,” she said. “That’s quite the schedule you have there.”

Ivy’s lips twisted as she set it down on the table next to her campus map. “I’ve got to do it,” she said. “I’m already a year behind.”

“Won’t any of your credits transfer?”

Ivy fought the urge to laugh. She could just see herself at the registrar’s office, Winterbourne Academy schedule in hand. 

“Not a one,” Ivy said, with a profound, ugly sigh. “It’s all right, though. My grades weren’t very good anyway.”

Natalie’s gaze held pity, and Ivy cursed the lie. Her grades at Winterbourne hadn’t been bad. They hadn’t been perfect, either, but she’d done her best.

Especially in those last few months. When she’d shunned the company of everyone but Denise and become something of a social pariah.

Ivy made herself smile. “I don’t suppose you could point me to the easy classes?”

“Not likely,” Natalie said with a laugh. “You’re studying chemistry. I’m a journalism major.”

“Isn’t it all the same in the first few years?”

“Some of it. I wriggled out of most of the science classes, though. AP classes for the win.”

Ivy sighed again. That was another thing she’d missed out on at Winterbourne. College credits that might have helped her graduate sooner.

Natalie checked her watch. “Well, it’s that time. Don’t want to be late on your first day of classes!”

Ivy bit back her groan. She stood, hefting the hundreds of dollars’ worth of textbooks she’d just purchased. “I’ll see you back at the room later?”

Natalie grinned. “You know it.”

Natalie set off across the sprawling campus green. At least there was a silver lining to leaving Winterbourne and returning to the human world; she’d been accepted into the same college as Natalie, and they were roommates, sharing a tiny, box-sized room on the south quad.

Ivy sighed, shifted her books in her hands, and set off across campus. Her chemistry class—the first towards the brand-new major she selected—took place on the third floor of Allen Hall. Allen was a dull building; a hunk of grey concrete sitting on a square acre of gravel gardens filled with statuary. In its time, it had been a marvel of the modernist movement, all sleek lines and no artifice.

Ivy stared up at the blank, featureless façade, missing the graceful ivy of Winterbourne with every breath.

“Are you coming?” a voice asked.

Ivy snapped to attention. A tall boy stood in the glass entryway of the building, holding the door wide.

Ivy jolted into motion. “Sorry,” she said.

A puzzled frown stole over his broad face. “Why?”

It was such an odd question. Ivy drew to a halt. She looked at the boy. Deep brown hair hung down over his forehead, half-hiding blue eyes from view. “Why what?”

“Why are you sorry?”

“Because I made you wait,” Ivy said. When the boy didn’t respond, she nodded backwards towards the entryway. “With the door.”

The boy arched an eyebrow. “Typically, when someone does me a favor, I say thank you rather than sorry.”

Ivy straightened. A flush heated her cheeks, but the embarrassment she’d felt earlier, when he’d caught her staring at the building, vanished as if it had never been.

Ivy let her eyes trail up and down the length of the boy’s body. His black jeans, puckered with holes, were stuffed into scuffed combat boots. A hoodie—black, of course—hung about his tall frame.

“And who taught you your manners?” she said.

The faintest hint of color tinged his cheeks. His lips drew down into a scowl. “Forget it,” he said. And walked away.

Of course, he was in her chemistry class. And of course, when the TA called out assignments in her oh-so-chipper voice, he was meant to be her lab partner.

He dropped his books—a stack less than half the size of Ivy’s—onto the black-topped lab table with a scowl.

“Maybe we should start again,” she said. “I’m Ivy Chance.”

“Al Madeline,” the boy said. He was still scowling.

Ivy waited for him to say something else. He remained stubbornly silent.

“Right then.” She dug through the stack of books she’d dropped on her desk, searching for her chemistry textbook.

“Are you planning on opening a bookstore?”

Ivy glanced up at Al, brow furrowed. “What?”

He tilted his head sideways. “Maybe you’re training for a decathlon?”

“I just bought my books,” Ivy said.

“That’s a lot of books.”

“I have a lot of classes.”

Al surveyed the stack. “That’s got to be over twenty semester hours.”

“It is,” Ivy said. “Why do you care?”

“I know how group projects work. And you should know from the beginning that I’m not going to carry your weight.”

For a moment, Ivy gaped at him. He leaned against the lab table, casual as he could be. As if he hadn’t just insulted her.

“For your information,” she said, tapping her finger against the table. “I’m a good student.”

“Obviously you’re trying to be,” Al said, with a snide look at the books.

“You’re one to talk.” She gave his outfit another glance. “What’s this? The return of grunge?”

Al scowled. “Maybe you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover.”

“Maybe you shouldn’t have a cover that’s so easy to judge.”

They stared at each other for a long, heated moment. Then Al stood, pushing back from the desk with a scrape. “I’m getting a new lab partner,” he said.

“Fantastic. Anything that will keep me from having to work with you.”

“Likewise,” Al said without even turning back.

The TA did not, in fact, reassign the lab partners. So Ivy slogged through a semester of chemistry 101 with Al Madeline, human frown emoji, by her side.

It wasn’t so bad. At least when they didn’t have to speak. Al seemed to think Ivy was genuinely incapable of handling some of the chemicals involved in the experiments, and so she wrote down observations while he boiled and titrated and measured. At the end of lab, he’d copy her notes and then disappear until the next class, where he turned in his own, self-generated report.

His grades were stellar. So stellar that it was almost irritating.

“Are we seriously not going to work together?”

Al looked up. His dark hair hung over his goggles, and for once his eyes were on full display. “What?”

“We’ve been at this for almost an entire semester now,” Ivy said. “You experiment, I record. It’s boring. Let me do something for a change.”

Al’s lips tightened. “No.”

“No,” Ivy repeated. “Just like that. No.”

“No.”

Ivy stood up. She reached for a beaker, pulling it closer. “This is ridiculous. It’s not going on any longer.”

“Like hell it isn’t,” Al said. He made a grab for the beaker.

Ivy didn’t let go. Not even when his hand settled atop hers, surprisingly warm through the nitrile of her gloves.

“You’re not even wearing gloves,” she said. “You shouldn’t be working with acid.”

“They’re right over there,” Al said. “I’m still setting up.”

Ivy tugged on the beaker. “I can help.”

“I don’t want your help.”

“Too bad.”

They both gripped the beaker, unwilling to let go.

“Why do you hate me?” Ivy asked. “All this time, the entire semester, you’ve hated me.”

“You insulted me.”

“You insulted me first!”

“I did not!”

“You did! Back on that first day after you held the door! You were a condescending prick!”

“And you’re a snob,” Al said.

“Oh, get over it. I made fun of your clothes. So what?”

“I’ve had enough of this. Give me the beaker.”

“No.”

“Chance,” Al said. There was a warning in his voice.

Ivy ignored it. “I have just as much right to this experiment as you do.”

He ground his teeth together. “Fine then. Have it your way.”

He let go.

And that was how Ivy and Al wound up in the dean’s office one bright May morning.

“Squabbling in the lab?” she said from behind her enormous pressboard desk. “Breaking beakers and spilling acid across the floor?”

Ivy flushed, and she looked down. Al’s jaw clenched tight as he stared out the window.

The dean gave no quarter. “Ms. Chance. Mr. Madeline. Explain yourselves.”

A lump formed in Ivy’s throat. She stared at her hands, much the same way she had one semester prior, on a dark night in a garden outside a ballroom.

“Well?” the dean said.

Ivy opened her mouth to speak, but Al beat her to it. “I’m sorry, Dean Smith. It was my fault.”

Ivy’s head snapped up. “What?”

Al didn’t stop talking. He didn’t even look Ivy’s way. “I didn’t think Ivy was capable of performing the experiments, so I did them myself.”

Ivy couldn’t help but be stung by the words. The dean, on the other hand, was staring at Al as if he was something under her shoe. “All of them?”

Al nodded, jaw still tight. “All of them. Except for this one.”

The implication in his words hit Ivy like a blow. “Now wait just a minute here,” she said.

The dean held up a hand. “Mr. Madeline, that is a very serious breach of our university code of conduct. We believe in equal opportunity for all students. Disallowing Ms. Chance the opportunity to perform her own experiments robbed her of a chance to learn.”

“I know,” Al said. “And I’m sorry.”

The words hung heavy over the room. The dean tapped her pen on her blotter once, then twice, before she shifted her gaze to Ivy. “Did you have something to say, Ms. Chance?”

Ivy hesitated for a moment. Al had taken the blame for the incident. He’d played the martyr, and damned if she didn’t want to let him. Damned if she didn’t want to walk out of this room, put this whole semester behind her, and move on with her life.

But she couldn’t do it. She couldn’t let him take the fall.

“I shouldn’t have grabbed for the beaker that day,” she said quietly. “I shouldn’t have fought him for it.”

“No, you should not have,” the dean said. “And if you had a problem with your lab partner, you should have taken it up with your instructor rather than brawling on the floor.”

They hadn’t been brawling, exactly, but Ivy knew it wouldn’t help to point that out.

The dean smoothed her hands over her desk calendar. “Now then. You both appear to be good students. Your grades—except for this one, apparently—are excellent. And you are both freshman. Young and untried. Foolish. I’m willing to overlook this incident, provided that it never happens again.”

Ivy nodded furiously. Al bit his lip and nodded as well.

“Very good,” the dean said. She stood. “You will both repeat the class next semester. Separately. Ms. Chance so that she may perform her own experiments, and Mr. Madeline so that he may hopefully learn how to get along with a lab partner. Is that understood?”

Ivy nodded again, biting back a sigh. She was even further behind in her curriculum now. Great.

“I don’t want to see you in here again,” the dean said. “Either of you. This is a university, not a nursery school. I expect you to keep your personal disagreements out of our laboratories and away from the dangerous chemicals.”

She crossed to her office and opened the door, showing both of them the way out.


	4. Chapter 4

iv

When she retook the class that summer, Ivy passed Chemistry 101. She sailed through the second introductory level class, and into the heart of the major: physical chemistry, instrumental analysis, and the ever-dreaded organic chemistry. She managed them all with a dogged perseverance that came only from studying magic at Winterbourne, loving it, and then turning her back on it completely.

Within two years, she’d become a star of the department. Unfortunately, she wasn’t the only one.

Ivy crossed her arms and scowled across the conference room to where a cluster of people were bunched around a single exhibit. She marked the slim, almost gangly figure of her advisor, the more burly shape of the Director of Undergraduate Studies in Chemistry, and the bald pate of the Dean of Arts and Sciences, glistening in the stark, recessed lights.

Ivy scowled harder.

“Try not to take it personally,” Natalie advised. She stood at Ivy’s elbow, messenger bag over one shoulder and coffee cup in one hand. A floppy knit hat perched atop her mass of black curls.

“Try not to take it personally!” Ivy said. A bit too loud, because at the next table Jia Yun arched a brow.

Ivy glared at her, but she lowered her voice. “I have been working on this project for months,” she told Natalie. “Months! I did my own research! I planned my own experiments! And Golden Boy pulls an AncestryDNA test out of his back pocket, and every faculty member in 100 paces _ooo’s_ and _ah’s_ at him.”

Natalie worried her bottom lip. “It’s not just an out of the box kit though, is it? It’s a cross-cultural study where he’s gathered his own samples—”

“It’s biology!” Ivy snapped. “He’s not even a biology major!”

Natalie, wisely, took a sip of her coffee and said no more.

Ivy raised her hands and bunched them in her hair. She’d been so proud of her experiment, one that could possibly be the precursor to a new superconductor, that she’d actually worn a suit. She’d curled her hair. She’d worn makeup, for Chrissakes. And yet Al Madeline had waltzed into the conference room wearing beat-up jeans and a worn sweatshirt and instantly dazzled the judges with some inane experiment on local DNA.

The cluster of judges around Al’s table split up, and Ivy instantly snapped back to attention. She forced a pleasant smile onto her face and clasped her hands in front of her. The judges had been by once already, but surely someone would want to see her experiment. Surely someone would want to take a second look…

“Are you ready to begin trials yet?”

Ivy closed her eyes and fought the urge to swear. She reeled around to find Al Madeline standing behind her. His hands were shoved in his pockets, and though his shoulders were rounded forward in a careless slouch, he still stood at least a half a foot taller than Ivy.

Ivy drew herself up to her full height. “What do you care?”

“Just making conversation,” Al said. “Creating a new superconductor would be quite the feat.”

“Not as impressive as cataloguing the DNA of migrant populations in the area. Apparently.”

The corners of Al’s mouth kicked up. “Tell me how you really feel, Chance.”

Ivy thought about it. She really did. “Did they give you the scholarship, then?”

“Not officially. But Dr. Morris did say to ‘look for an email on Tuesday.’ So that’s a good sign, at least.”

Not for Ivy. Her lips pressed together, forming a thin line. “Congratulations.”

Al smiled, a touch sheepishly. He reached up to rake a hand through his already mussed hair. The muscles of his biceps stretched in an annoyingly eye-catching way, and Ivy hated herself for looking. For watching him move and stretch and flex. That was the thing she hated most about Al, she decided. Not that they’d been competing for the same scholarships and internships and laboratory assistantships since freshman year. Not the fact that he seemed to win them twice as often as he lost. Not even the casual, self-assured way that he seemed to fit himself into every room, every situation, with the grace and panache of an inveterate spy.

No, it was the fact that he was so damned handsome. Al was over six feet of lean muscle and unselfconscious grace. His chiseled jaw belonged on the cover of a magazine, and though she’d never seen it, she suspected that the rest of his body might be at home there as well. Even the pose he was in now—hand resting behind his head, elbow out-thrust—made him look like a model on his day off, posing for an audience of one.

Ivy scowled even as she traced the line of her arm with her eyes. He usually kept his sweatshirt on, and even though she hated it, she couldn’t pass up the opportunity to look. His skin was darker than she’d expected, more golden. A single tattoo marred the line of his forearm.

A rushing filled Ivy’s ears. The tattoo—

“I really did like your project you know,” Al said. “If you’re in the market for a lab partner during the trial stage…”

Ivy’s mouth had gone suddenly, impossibly dry. She stared at Al’s arm. The tattoo was etched in the form of a semi-circle. Swirling lines snaked through it, black under the fluorescent lights of the conference room.

“Ivy?” Al asked. “Are you alright? You look… pale.”

Ivy’s voice sounded weak even to her own ears. “You… you have a tattoo.”

Al’s eyebrows lifted, then he grimaced. He dropped his arm, covering the mark with his right hand. “Yeah,” he said. “I suppose I do.”

Ivy just stared. Faint tendrils of the mark stood out past Al’s fingers. She had a sneaking suspicion that, in the full light of the sun, the marks would be a startling indigo in places. Just like hers.

“Where did you get it?” Ivy asked. _Please say a tattoo parlor. Please let this be a coincidence…_

Al shrugged his shoulders, suddenly and uncharacteristically uncomfortable. “I don’t… I don’t really remember,” he said, not meeting her eyes.

The pit that had been threatening in Ivy’s stomach suddenly yawned wide. She didn’t remember getting hers either. It had simply appeared.

Al fidgeted. “Look, I just wanted to say ‘no hard feelings.’ Your project was great. I’m sure you’ll get them next time.”

“Next time,” Ivy echoed. Her voice sounded about as hollow as she felt.

“Right then,” Al said. He waited for Ivy to say something, but when she didn’t, he sighed. “See you around, Chance.”

Ivy stared at him. When she said nothing, Al turned and walked away.

Ivy pressed her fingers to her lips. “See you,” she whispered, as he disappeared into the crowd.

An hour later, Ivy pushed her way past her aunt’s front door. The familiar smell of lemon and coriander rose up to wrap around her, but this time she found no comfort in the scent. Her skin was cold, and she’d been trembling for the last forty minutes. Some part of her realized that she might very well be going into shock.

“Aunt C?” she called into the dark parlor. “Aunt C, are you here?”

Her aunt’s ginger tabby raised his head. He had been napping on the window sill, in the fresh, vibrant light of the morning sun.

For a moment, Ivy stared at the cat. The cat stared back. And then he hopped down, bottle-brush tail lifted high, and practically flew into the darkened recesses of the house.

Ivy knew she should have followed him. She knew that was probably the fastest, easiest way to find her aunt. But her legs were shaking now—actually shaking—and it was all she could do to wobble over to the nearest chair. She collapsed there and tipped her head back, struggling to breathe.

Footsteps hastened out of the dark. “Ivy? Ivy, what’s wrong?”

Ivy shook her head. There was an enormous weight on her chest. It pressed her into the soft cushions of the chair.

A moment passed, and then a smaller, softer weight dropped into her lap. Ivy felt soft feline paws moving about, scratching the silky fabric of her shirt.

Suddenly she could breathe again. She drew in a deep breath. Spots danced in front of her eyes, but she focused on the ceiling and gradually they faded. She raised a hand, absently, to stroke the soft fur piled in her lap. For once, Wilson allowed it. He butted his head up against Ivy’s side.

“Better?” Celinda asked after a long moment.

Ivy nodded slowly. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t… I don’t know what happened.”

“Quite all right,” Celinda said. She gave Ivy’s knee a firm pat. “We all have our moments sometimes.”

Ivy stared up at the ceiling, watching beams of sunlight dance on the exposed beams. She had a stark, irresistible surge of memory of laying on the floor in this very room, watching the same lights caper and frolic. Of course, this was her aunt’s house, and they weren’t really lights. They were wills, caught by the mirrored suncatchers Celinda had hung on the windows. Ensnared. Entranced.

Ivy felt a bit entranced herself. It was the only way she could account for her flight from the symposium.

“Is there something you want to talk about, blossom?”

Ivy sucked in a deep breath. She didn’t want to talk about it, not really. She’d raced back to her hometown on pure instinct, because that’s what she did when something went wrong. Have a magical disaster? Find Aunt C.

But it wasn’t a disaster, strictly speaking. And it wasn’t something that Celinda could fix.

“I found out who has the mate to this,” Ivy said. She flopped her hand over towards her aunt, revealing the familiar soulmark on her forearm.

Celinda settled herself on the low, battered sofa nearby. “You don’t sound happy about that.”

“No,” Ivy said. “I suppose I don’t.”

A heavy silence settled between the two of them. That was one of the nice things about Celinda, about witches in general; most of them felt little urge to fill uncomfortable silences.

The corollary to that statement was, however, that they also didn’t mind asking uncomfortable questions. “Who is it?”

Ivy sighed. She stroked the cat’s fur, kneading the area behind his neck. “He’s a student at my school. I’ve known him for years.”

“There’s another witch at your school?”

Ivy lifted her head then. She met Celinda’s gaze. “I… I’m not sure.”

“You’re not sure?”

“We’re not friends,” Ivy said. “Not even anything close.”

“And you’ve never asked him?”

Ivy couldn’t contain her snort. “How would that go, exactly? ‘Excuse me, but I’m a witch, and I wondered if you possibly were, too? Also, are you by chance my soulmate?’”

“Sarcasm is not an endearing trait, blossom.”

Ivy rolled her eyes. She straightened in her chair, and the cat cast a baleful eye at her as he was jostled on her lap. “You know what I mean, Auntie. There are precious few witches at human universities. I always assume the people I meet are human. It’s safer that way.”

“It certainly is,” Celinda said. “Although perhaps we should make a habit to revisit that assumption in the future.”

Ivy pursed her lips, but she didn’t say anything. She stared down at her aunt’s cat, marveling at the softness of the striped fur sliding under her palms. Surely this, then, was the sign of the apocalypse. She was petting him, and she hadn’t yet been scratched to bits.

“What am I supposed to do?”

The question came out on a soft sigh. Ivy hadn’t expected to ask it, let alone to want an answer from her aunt so badly. But it was there now, hanging in the open between them, and Ivy couldn’t take it back.

“Who says you have to do anything?” Celinda said.

Ivy turned her gaze on her aunt. “What?”

“You’ve never liked your soulmark.” At Ivy’s disgruntled look, Celinda waved a hand. “Don’t try to deny it. You don’t hide your feelings very well. When you staggered in here at sixteen with a mystery on your arm, you didn’t react the way any of us suspected. You didn’t jump for joy, or sigh hopefully, or even blink in wonder. You were scared. Defiant. You didn’t want a tattoo on your arm—something you didn’t ask for—to rule your life.”

Celinda shifted in her chair. Her eyes, when they next met Ivy’s, were unbearably soft. Unbearably kind. “It’s not an unreasonable proposition. We may be witches, we may trade in magic, but fate is another power entirely. Inescapable. Inexorable. Strong. Most witches don’t like to ponder it for long.”

“I’ve thought about it,” Ivy said softly.

“Of course you have,” Celinda said. “Of course you have, because you’ve had to. Soulmarks are burdens as much as they are blessings. They’re signs that there’s something out there in the universe guiding our hands. Making our choices. You’ve never liked that, and I can’t blame you. Who would?”

Ivy looked down at her soulmark. In the five years since she’d found it, she’d gotten used to the sight of it on her arm. It no longer looked foreign or strange; it was just another part of her. A mysterious, occasionally troubling part.

“This is going to sound stupid,” Ivy said, “but once… once upon a time I believed in it. Or maybe believed in it is a stupid way to put it, because everyone ‘believes’ in soulmarks, but in my darkest hour—at the academy—I hoped that I really did have a soulmate. That there was someone out there who could understand exactly where I was coming from. Someone who could love me exactly the way I was.”

Celinda patted Ivy’s knee. “We all hope for that, blossom.”

Tears welled in Ivy’s eyes, and though she fought to contain them, to blink them away, they slipped down her face unbidden. “But that’s the problem,” she said. “My soulmate… we don’t get along. He could never love me.”

“Maybe that’s the way it is now,” Celinda said. “But could it change? In the future?”

Ivy bit down on her lip and shook her head. “I’ve hated him since the moment I met him,” she said, letting the tears fall. “And he’s hated me.”

“Ah,” Celinda said. And that was really all there was to be said for it, wasn’t there?

Ivy sniffled. She scratched at her arm, as if she could peel the soulmark off like a temporary tattoo. “I don’t suppose there’s any way to get rid of it, is there?”

Celinda’s gaze was kind. “No.”

Ivy sighed then. In her lap, the cat turned wide, baleful eyes on her. Ivy gave up on the pretense of decorum and scooped him up. She pressed her face into the fur of his neck.

“Look on the bright side, blossom,” Celinda said. “No one could ever claim that your life isn’t interesting.”

Ivy’s laugh came out on a sob.


	5. Chapter 5

v

During the next few months, Ivy watched Al carefully for signs of magic. A cup of coffee that always stayed warm. A blazer that always stayed dry. A meeting that was conveniently rescheduled when he didn’t feel like attending it.

There was nothing.

And so, as they left junior, and then senior year behind, Ivy was forced to accept the essential truth: Al had no magic. He wasn’t a witch.

Which put her in a decidedly odd position. If he’d known about soulmarks, she could have just showed him her arm. Flashed the evidence, so to speak, and gotten on with it. But now, if she showed it to him, she’d look like some sort of crazy stalker. Who gets the same tattoo—the exact same tattoo—as someone they barely like?

Ivy graduated in spring, on time, with honors, and moved onto a graduate program at the same university she’d been attending.

Al did, too.

“Are you following me?” he asked the first day. “Stalking me?”

Ivy rolled her eyes. “Please. Like I want to be on the same continent as you.”

But they were on more than the same continent. They had both been selected to fill graduate assistantships in teaching. And those graduate assistantships unfortunately shared an office.

“Why me?” Ivy said, gazing skyward as she moved her stuff in.

It wasn’t as bad as she thought. The office was shared with three other TA’s—older students, mostly—and they were a blast. When they were all in the office together, grading or chatting or studying on their own—Ivy could forget that Al was there, a looming, sarcastic presence in the corner.

He also seemed to be making an effort to refrain from carrying their undergraduate feud forward. Though she still felt a few sarcastic barbs land from time to time, for the most part, they ignored each other; Ivy carried on about her business, and Al about his.

There was relative peace. Until the conference. Until the snowstorm.

Ivy gave the hotel clerk her best death glare. “What do you mean you don’t have any rooms?”

“I’m so sorry.” The words came out in an over-bright rush. “It’s the snow, unfortunately. Quite a few of our guests from last night didn’t leave—can’t leave—because of the roads. The governor’s declared a state of emergency, you know. I don’t know how you even got here.”

Ivy’s teeth ground in a harsh rumble that was probably audible at fifty paces. “I can’t go back out there either,” she said. “The last five miles of my trip took me an hour to drive. I’m betting the nearest hotel is more than five miles away.”

“Actually, there’s one right next door,” the clerk said. “You’ll be able to walk to it. I can call them to see if they have any vacancies, if you like.”

Ivy’s jaw dropped open. Of all the stupid…

“Yes,” she said tightly. “That would be fine.”

The clerk smiled, a bit aggressively, and lifted her phone.

She turned around, resting her back against the wood of the front desk. To say that it had been a long day would have been like saying that the New York marathon was a short run. Ivy had left home before 6:00 this morning, and she had run into snow before 11:00 am. Now, it was 4:00 and every radio station in the area was broadcasting the news: Winter Storm Marigold had borne down on the east coast and every state from Georgia all the way up through Vermont had been declared a state of emergency.

She’d pushed through the storm and made it to her hotel after at least three hours of white-knuckle driving. Once she’d gotten there, she figured that her problems would be solved; the rental was meant to have a kitchen, and she had food and water enough in her trunk to last at least three days, if not more. She’d simply hunker down and wait out the storm.

Except, apparently, Ivy wasn’t the only one with the same idea.

The hotel clerk behind Ivy set down her phone with a dull thud. “I’m afraid I have a bit of bad news.”

Ivy rounded on her. “You can’t tell me I don’t have a room. I made a reservation.”

“I’m so sorry,” the hotel clerk said again. “As I’ve said, the snow—”

“Chance?”

Ivy whirled at the sound of her name. Standing beneath an archway, wrapped in a thick white sweater, was Al.

“Al?” Ivy said, blinking at him. 

He strode up to her. His winter boots clunked against the sleek floors of the lobby. “What are you doing here?”

Ivy’s scowl was purely reflex. “What am I doing here? What are you doing here? This isn’t on the conference itinerary.”

“That’s why I came up early,” Al said. “Were you planning to see the caverns?”

Ivy’s lips twisted. “I was planning it,” she said. “Before. You know.”

She waved her hand at the door, indicating the white mess of snow buffeting the glass.

Al heaved a sigh that seemed to move his whole body. “Sucks. I’ve wanted to see them for years.”

Ivy couldn’t help the way her eyebrows lifted. For combat-boot wearing, disagreeable Al, admitting to the enjoyment of anything was grounds for concern, if not outright astonishment. “Seriously?”

“Caves are cool, Chance,” Al said, crossing his arms.

My eyebrows raised even higher. “You know, if you were anyone else, I might actually think that was a pun.”

He smiled then, a bare pursing of lips. “So we know what you’re doing here, but what are you doing _here_?” He indicated the front desk with a point.

“Trying to get a room,” Ivy said with a sigh, “because _someone_ gave my reservation away.”

The clerk muttered something that might have rhymed with ‘witch.’

Ivy glared at her, but Al was already moving. He came up to the desk. “Are there any rooms nearby?”

“Apparently not,” Ivy said, readjusting the computer bag slung over her shoulder.

Al stiffened briefly, as if he was bracing himself for something. “You could stay with me.”

For a moment, Ivy just stared at him. The words echoed in her ears.

“Stay. With you?”

“It’s better than sleeping in your car, isn’t it?”

The temperature had dropped from thirty to fifteen during the day. It was said to continue falling through the night, reaching a low of -10.

“Yes,” she said. “That would be… it’s much better.”

“Great,” Al said. His shoulders were stiff as he casually bent down and snatched Ivy’s suitcase from the floor.

He led the way back down the hall and to a small studio at the end of the hallway. The lights and the fire were already blazing, and a wave of warmth rose up to welcome Ivy like an old friend.

She unwound her scarf, watching as Al opened a door at the far end and secreted his suitcase away inside the closet. “Sorry it’s not bigger,” he said. “I’d planned to be the only one staying here.”

“Any port in a storm, right? Is there a bathroom?”

He pointed towards a doorway off the kitchen area.

Ivy excused herself and went to splash warm water on her face. When she returned, she discovered Al in the kitchen. He stood in front of the fridge, staring at the flickering white light.

She cleared her throat. “Is there something you’re looking for?”

He glanced sideways at her, brow furrowing. “Food,” he said forlornly. “I’ve got a six pack of beer and leftovers from lunch. We can share it…”

Ivy waved a hand. “I’ve got groceries in my car.”

“Really?”

“There’s a snowstorm going on, Madeline. You’ve got to be prepared.”

He rolled his eyes. “At least I’ve got a room.”

“Well, I’ve got food. So for once in your life, say thank you and move on.”

“I’ll say it if you will.”

They stared at each other across the open door of the fridge. This was familiar ground, at least. Fighting with Al. They’d been fighting since freshman year, since the fateful chem 101 class. But as she’d gotten more serious and more studious and more experienced, things had changed. She still fought with Al—the verbal duels were legend all throughout the department. But that’s all they were. Duels.

The true anger behind Ivy’s words—behind their knockdown, drag-out fights—was gone.

“Thank you for inviting me to stay, Madeline. Al.”

A smile graced Al’s lips. “You’re welcome.”

Ivy waited for him to finish the thought. To thank her for dinner and breakfast and whatever else for however long we were going to be stuck here. But he merely stood there, looking at her.

She rolled her eyes. “Ass.”

He grinned then, a smile of pure, almost childish delight. “Thanks for dinner,” he said, slipping his coat back on. “Let’s go fetch it, shall we?”

Sighing, Ivy followed him back out the door.

Al sat back in the stuffed armchair, groaning. “I cannot believe you brought a turkey to a hotel.”

Ivy shrugged, scraping the last of the cranberry sauce onto her spoon. “There’s a full kitchen. And besides, it was a turkey breast, not an entire turkey.”

“Still,” Al said. He clasped his hands together behind his back. “A meal like this should have taken hours to cook.”

Unease raised the hairs on the back of Ivy’s neck. He wasn’t wrong. Cooking a turkey breast in an ill-maintained oven in a hotel, of all things, should have taken a full two hours. Add in resting time—and some time to stir up some gravy—and they should have been eating in the middle of the night.

But ‘should-have’s’ didn’t mean much to a witch. Ivy had cooked the turkey yesterday while she packed, then frozen it in time with her aunt’s patented Time-Stopper solution. It was a fiddly potion—the calculations that went into cooking it up were a bitch—but the gist of it was that time within a millimeter of the turkey essentially stopped; it stayed as fresh and as hot as if it had just come out of the oven.

She’d dumped the antidote onto it while Al was in the bathroom. The seal of the smell broke, and the aroma of roasting fowl had wafted into the room.

Ivy ate the last of her cranberry sauce—also pre-prepared—and set her plate aside. “I guess I’m just talented.”

Al rolled his eyes. “Modest, too.”

“Modesty is for amateurs.”

“And you’re a professional chef?”

“I’m a chemist,” I said. “And cooking and chemistry aren’t so different, are they?”

Al’s nose wrinkled. “I’m not sure mixing acids should qualify you to baste a turkey.”

“What do you think vinegar is for?”

Al heaved a sigh. “Do you always have to argue, Chance?”

Ivy opened her mouth—to argue—and stopped. She tilted my head to the side. “Of course not.”

Al snorted. “I’ll believe it when I see it.”

He levered himself up from his chair and moved to the kitchen. “Did you bring some sort of container for leftovers?”

“I was just going to put it back into the pan.”

“But it’s not airtight.”

“It’ll be fine,” Ivy said.

He moved to lift the turkey out of the pan and onto a plate. “Really, Chance. As a chemist, shouldn’t you know something about food safety?”

“Who’s arguing now?”

Al glared at her, but he bit his tongue. He lifted the pan into the sink and squirted soap into the bowl.

“I can do that,” she said, automatically.

He waved her off. “You cooked. I can do it. Sit down. Have a beer.”

Since Ivy had already consumed one of his six, precious beers, she snatched a soda out of the fridge instead. She curled up in the chair Al had just vacated. The scent of him rose up to embrace her—some sort of piney aftershave laced through with something else.

Al tossed a dish towel over one shoulder, and the movement caught Ivy’s eye. For a moment, she just watched him. She had an alarmingly good view of his broad shoulders and long, lean back. Part of her wondered whether he’d ever been a swimmer.

And then the other part of her slapped herself because, whoa. Al.

Still though, with him moving around the kitchen, paying her no attention at all, it felt almost… normal. Watching him wash dishes was almost unnerving in its simplicity; it reeked of a domesticity that, even with a loving mother and an eccentric, but well-meaning aunt, Ivy had never had.

For a moment she could see him in her aunt’s kitchen, head bowed over her cast iron cauldron. A green glow bathed his face, making aquiline features into pure art.

“If you keep staring like that, I’m going to have to do something to justify it,” Al said.

Ivy’s eyes snapped to his, and she realized that she’d been caught. A furious blush worked its way across her face. “Sorry. I was just… thinking.”

Al arched his eyebrows. “Thinking?”

It was as much of an invitation as she’d ever gotten from him. She was used to untouchable Al; the man who wore combat boots to undergraduate symposiums. The teacher who returned papers with ‘nice try, idiot,’ written on top in red ink.

He reached up to put a pan back onto the top shelf, and the waistband on his sweater rode up, revealing just enough skin to make her wish the rest of it might disappear.

And wow, maybe that Time-Freeze had gone off. Ivy really needed to call Celinda and find out if delusions were some sort of known side-effect.

“Look, I really appreciate you letting me stay here,” she said. “It was very… generous. But we don’t have to do this, if you don’t want to.”

Al resettled the turkey in its dish before covering it with foil and setting it in the fridge. “This?”

“We aren’t… we’re not friends,” Ivy said. “We don’t get along. At all.”

“We’re getting along now.”

They were. It was unnerving.

“We don’t have to do the small talk thing, if you don’t want to. I don’t need you to ask me about my day, or compliment my cooking, or whatever. We can just… sit. Watch TV.”

Al dried the last dish and tucked it away. He turned around, bracing his arms behind him on the counter. “Can I ask you a question?”

Ivy shrugged, a touch uneasily. “I guess.”

“Why do you dislike me?”

For a moment Ivy just stared at him. Heat rose to her cheeks. “I… come again?”

“You don’t like me. Don’t try to deny it. I know it’s true. Everybody knows it’s true. But I’ve always wondered why.”

“It’s not… I can’t… You’ve got to be kidding!”

Al’s eyebrows crept up towards his hairline. “I’m not kidding. We’re colleagues, Chance. We work together every day. If you were like this with everyone, I’d let it go, but you and Professor Marguilles go out for coffee every Wednesday. Dr. Smithson adores you. You bring cookies into the department once a month. You have a smile for everyone there. Except for me.”

Ivy crossed her arms. “Seriously? You’re upset because I don’t smile at you?”

“It’s not the smiles. It’s the camaraderie. Or, more simply put, the basic lack of courtesy. What’s the deal, Chance? Why do you hate me?”

“I don’t hate you.”

Al shot me a dubious look.

“I don’t,” she said. “Besides, you don’t like me either.”

“That is not true.”

Now it was Ivy’s turn to raise an eyebrow. “Isn’t it? You’ve hardly said a word to me since freshman year.”

“I don’t know if you’ve noticed this,” Al said dryly. “But I’m not one for idle chat.”

Ivy tilted her head to one side, lips twisting. “Every time we have spoken, it was always so you could gloat!”

“Gloat? When have I gloated?”

“Finals week, senior year. Undergraduate symposium—”

“That was three years ago! Are you honestly still holding a grudge because I won?”

“You’re a chemistry student,” Ivy said. “That was biology.”

“It was a personal project,” Al said.

“A personal project that was high on wow factor and low on science.”

Al stared at her for a moment, jaw slack. Then he snapped his mouth shut and turned away. “You know what? Forget it. We’ll do it your way.”

He hauled a chair over in front of the TV, seized the remote, and turned it on.

They sat in silence for a long moment, Ivy in her chair, and Al in his. The colored lights played across his face.

“I’m sorry if I offended you,” she said quietly.

Al made a slashing motion. “Forget it. It’s done.”

“Al—”

“I said forget it,” he said. And turned the volume up.

Al didn’t speak. He didn’t surrender the remote, didn’t ask if Ivy knew what was on. He just stared at the TV, jaw clenched tight.

Ivy had asked for this. She’d asked for a return to normalcy, for the state of affairs between them—such as it was—to remain unchanged. And yet even though she’d asked for it—even though she said it was okay—it wasn’t. Not really.

She retreated to the bathroom, snatching her suitcase on the way so she could change into pajamas.

When she returned, Al had, finally, moved. He’d pushed his chair back to the skinny table, and he was reaching up towards a small handle concealed high on the wall.

Ivy watched as he pulled it down, revealing a bed that had been neatly tucked away.

One bed. The only bed.

Ivy’s hands clenched on the pile of clothes in her arms. Her eyes darted to the chair. It would be comfortable enough, she supposed. Small.

“I’m not going to molest you in your sleep,” Al said.

Ivy’s head jerked around. Al stood next to the bed. His fists were clenched by his sides.

“No, it’s not… I don’t want to impose.”

Al snorted. He opened the closet door and hauled a small gym bag over his shoulder. “Don’t be stupid. You’re already imposing. Sharing a bed isn’t going to make it any worse.”

Ivy lifted her chin. “I disagree.”

Al rolled his eyes. “We’re both adults here. Sleep where you want.”

He disappeared into the bathroom, slamming the door behind him.

Ivy let out a harsh breath. She stared at the bed. It wasn’t… well, it wasn’t small. That was something, at least.

She tucked her clothes back into her suitcase and slipped beneath the covers, turning her back to the bathroom door. She’d just pretend to be asleep when Al came out. Maybe if she did, this night would come to a merciful end.

The door opened, and light spilled into the dark room. Steam barreled from the open bathroom door, fresh-smelling and sweet. Had he taken a shower?

Ivy pressed her eyes together and lay still. She heard Al’s footfalls as he moved around the room, shutting off the lights. When they lay in near darkness, he hesitated by the other side of the bed.

“I know you’re not asleep,” he said.

Ivy didn’t reply.

Al peeled back the covers and slipped underneath them. “Coward.”

Ivy opened her eyes. “Am not.”

“It’s just a bed, Chance.”

The statement was so casual. And yet Ivy could hear every ounce of satisfaction in his tone.

“It’s not the bed. It’s the situation. It’s… awkward.”

“We’re just going to sleep,” Al said. “Unless you don’t think you can control yourself.”

Ivy jerked. “What? Me! You—”

“I saw the way you were looking at me earlier.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“God, just admit it,” Al said. “You want me. It’s fine.”

Ivy grasped for words for a long time. Her mouth flopped open and closed like a fish. “You’re the worst, do you know that?”

“Because you want me. If you didn’t, you wouldn’t hate me half as much.”

“That doesn’t even make any sense!”

“It makes perfect sense. You’re just like everyone else, Chance. You want what you can’t have.”

Ivy’s temper finally boiled over, and she rolled over on the bed. Al was pressed up on one elbow, looming down at her like some Roman emperor waiting for his bowl of grapes. He’d taken off his shirt, and even in the dim light filtering in from the window, Ivy could see the hard planes of his chest.

They fairly scrambled her brain.

“Listen here, you… you biologist!”

“Biologist? That’s the best insult you could come up with?”

“Shut up!” Ivy said. Heat flamed in her cheeks, and she lifted up until she was level with Al’s gaze. “I don’t like you! I’ve never liked you! And the idea that I could want you, you idiot, self-absorbed egotistical— why are you smiling?”

Ivy had about six more adjectives queued up, each more disparaging than the last. But the sight of Al’s face split into a broad, cheek-stretching grin, shoved all of them from her mind.

He chuckled, and the bed trembled beneath her.

Ivy gaped at him for a moment. “What—what’s wrong with you?”

“I’m just wondering if you could be any more cliché,” Al said.

“Cliché?” Ivy said.

“This is like a scene out of a bad romance novel,” Al said. He traced a line on the coverlet between them. “Or fanfiction.”

His skin stood out in stark contrast to the coverlet, a rich, emerald green like the forest in summer. Ivy was so entranced by it that she almost missed what he said.

She looked up. “You read fanfic?”

“I don’t,” Al said. “But now I know you do.”

Ivy’s eyes narrowed. “You’re an ass, Madeline.”

“Only when I’m around you.”

“Well then I have the perfect solution for both of us: stay away from me.”

Ivy rolled back over, pulled the covers up to her chin, and closed her eyes.

The room settled into silence. A shifting of weight and the creaking of the mattress springs announced that Al had given up on looming over her.

But picturing him—laying in the bed, less than a foot away—didn’t do anything to calm Ivy’s racing thoughts. Or her racing pulse. It was too dim to see much of him, but the glimpse she’d caught of his chest had been enough to fuel a week’s worth of very solid daydreams.

A week that was starting right now.

Behind Ivy, Al shifted. She felt the heavy weight of him settle closer to her own. Beneath the sheets, heat radiated out from him, calling out to Ivy like a siren on a moonless night.

“That’s my problem, I suppose. I can’t.”

The words were quiet. Barely a whisper in the night. But Ivy heard them loud and clear.

“I’ve tried to ignore you,” Al said. “I’ve spent years trying to forget you. But every time I think I’ve done it, there you are. In my classes. In my study groups. In my head.”

“I am not in your head,” Ivy said.

“You are, though.” He leaned closer. The hot rasp of his breath on the back of her neck sent shivers down her spine. “I think about you all the time. The way you pull your hair back when you’re about to go into the lab. The way your brow furrows when you’re grading papers. Even that stupid little pout you make when things aren’t going your way.”

Ivy’s eyes were wide. She clasped her arms tight around her middle. “Don’t say this,” she said. “Don’t do this.”

“Why not?” Al said.

“Because we’re not friends.”

“Maybe I don’t want to be friends.”

He settled a hand on her hip over the covers, and the gesture—so simple, so possessive—robbed Ivy of breath. Of words.

Al didn’t seem to have any trouble filling the silence. “This is going to sound stupid,” he said. “But when I saw you in the lobby tonight, I thought… it seemed like fate.”

A shiver rolled through Ivy, and her right hand clasped her left forearm. The soulmark seemed to burn beneath her palm. “You’re right,” she made herself say. “It does sound stupid.”

“Don’t do that,” Al said. “Don’t pretend like you don’t feel it. Like you don’t want it.”

Ivy’s heart pounded in her chest, hard enough to hurt. “You don’t know what I want.”

“Don’t I? In every class, every lab, every presentation, you want what I want. You want to be the best.”

His words were a curl of heat against Ivy’s spine. “That’s not it,” she said.

“Yes, it is.” He was close enough now that Ivy could feel his breath on her neck. “You want to be so good, so talented, so competent that when you walk into a room, everyone knows who you are. So that none of them would dare turn you away.”

Ivy sucked in a breath. “How do you know that?” she said. “How could you possibly know that?”

Ivy was turning before she realized it, flipping over onto her side to take him on.

It was a mistake.

She knew it from the moment saw his eyes, heavy-lidded and dark. Light from the window skated through the blinds and cast golden streaks across the bold planes of his face. One of them grazed his bottom lip, drawing Ivy’s eye to the place where she least wanted it to go.

“I told you,” Al said. His voice emerged in a slow, devastating rumble. “We’re the same.”

“We are not the same,” Ivy said.

“We are,” Al said. “The same ambition. The same drive. That’s why we’re rivals rather than friends. Rather than something else.”

His eyes dropped to Ivy’s lips. Heat blossomed low in her belly, and she pressed her legs together.

It was such a small movement. But Al saw it. Of course he did.

A slow, wicked smile spread across his face. “I knew it.”

“Shut up,” Ivy said.

“Why?” Al said. “Why fight it? Why not just have what we want?”

His hand slid out beneath the blankets to curl over her hip. The weight of it was so warm, so welcome, that Ivy flushed.

“We don’t get along,” she said, even as she reached for him. One hand traced a slow, meandering path up his abdomen. “We argue constantly.”

“I bet we can find something else to do with our mouths for an hour,” he said. “Maybe more.”

It was such a line. Such a terrible, awful cliché. And yet, as Al leaned towards her, Ivy couldn’t bring herself to back away. The skin of his chest was hot beneath her palm. Firm and muscled and everything. She wanted to peel back the covers and look at it. To lick every inch of that perfect, beautiful skin.

Al stopped, a hair’s breadth away from her lips. “Ivy,” he said.

The word was a plea. A request. And in that moment, there was nothing Ivy wanted more than to grant it.

She closed the distance between them. Al’s lips were warm and still beneath her own. His breathing hushed against her face. For a moment, the intimacy of it, the tenderness, was almost unbearable.

“Al,” Ivy whispered, against his lips.

He moved. His hand slid up her back, pulling her flush against him. Heat raced through her, spreading like wildfire from every place they touched. It consumed her in seconds, sending all thought of wrongness, of soulmates, away.

“Tell me you want this,” Al said, as he rolled her onto her back. As he rained a line of kisses down her throat.

“I want this,” Ivy said. She buried her hands in Al’s hair. “I want you.”

He didn’t wait any longer. He didn’t ask again. They stripped each other of clothes, of words, of boundaries in the dark. Ivy’s hands played over Al’s bare skin, and she had half a moment to wish that the lights were on. That she could see more of him than the shadows seeping through the blinds allowed.

And then his full weight was on top of her, his hard length between her legs, and the touch, the sensation was enough.

Later, when the sweat had cooled, and their breathing had returned to normal, Ivy lay in Al’s arms. He traced delicate, winding circles on the skin of her back. She curled into the touch.

“So,” he said, “that’s what five years of sexual frustration finally being resolved feels like.”

Ivy laughed so hard the bed shook.

Al lifted an eyebrow at her, and she raised her fingers to trace it. To trace the long, delicate line above his eye. When she’d met him, she’d found his eyebrow arches to be the picture of disdain. Of arrogance. Now, though, in this place, she could see the humor shining in his eyes. The fondness twisting at his lips. “What?” he asked.

“You haven’t wanted me for five years,” Ivy said. “We hated each other in freshman year. And not in a ‘get a room, you two!’ sort of way.”

“I didn’t hate you.”

Now it was Ivy’s turn to raise a brow. “You did. Although I’ve never understood why.”

Al shifted uneasily. “It wasn’t personal.”

“Wasn’t it?”

“No.” He looked away then. One arm stretched above his head to grasp the headboard, and for a moment, Ivy marveled at the picture he made. Here. Next to her.

She curled farther into his chest.

“I was dirt poor growing up,” Al said. “Living off government funds. When you made fun of my clothes… I took it personally.”

Ivy squeezed her eyes shut. Guilt squirmed through her, hot and unwelcome. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay. I figured… well, I figured you took it for granted. What you had.”

Ivy watched him for a long moment. She marveled at the strong line of his jaw. The stark cut of his collarbones against that perfect, muscled chest. “What did I have?”

Al laughed, but the noise was utterly without humor. “A right to exist?”

Ivy wrapped an arm around his stomach. “I don’t understand.”

“I didn’t have what you would call a normal childhood,” Al said. “I was in foster care.”

“Oh,” Ivy said. She traced a delicate, shivery line across his abs. “What happened to your parents?”

Al shrugged. “Dad died. Mom dropped me off at school one day and never picked me up.”

Ivy lifted her head. “I’m so sorry!”

“It was a long time ago.”

He stared off into the darkness for a long time.

Ivy flattened a palm against his stomach. “My dad left me, too.”

Al shifted, then. His eyes found hers in the dark. “Really?”

Ivy nodded. “He left me and my mom when I was just a baby. I never knew him at all.”

Al’s arm dropped then, and he pulled Ivy tighter against his side. The embrace was so warm, so intimate, that Ivy flushed all the way down to her toes.

She didn’t pull away. “So you hated me because I thought I had a family?”

“I hated you because you reminded me of every preppy girl in every high school I’ve ever been in.”

“Preppy!” Ivy said. “I have never been preppy.”

“You were wearing a collared shirt and you had like twenty books in your arms,” Al said. “What was I supposed to think?”

Ivy rolled her eyes. She dragged her nails across Al’s chest, lightly, and he hissed. “You’re supposed to give me the benefit of the doubt.”

He arched that brow again. “You, too.”

Ivy laughed. “All right. I guess that’s fair.”

She settled her head back against his chest. Al drew in a deep breath, and Ivy’s head moved along with it. She reveled in the sensation, in the closeness, in the heat of his body wrapped around hers.

“I’m glad I got stuck here,” she said, quietly. “I’m glad for the storm.”

“Don’t be too glad,” Al said. His voice was a rumble. “People might be dying out there right now.”

Ivy jabbed Al in the stomach. “Way to ruin it!”

He was already laughing. He grabbed her hand, kissing the knuckles. “Violence, Chance.”

“I’ll show you violence,” she said, grumbling, and snatched back her hand.

Al’s eyebrow lifted. “Is that a promise?”

A wicked thrill shot through her. “Do you want it to be?”

Al lifted a shoulder and let it fall. Careless. Casual. “We are snowed in.”

Ivy stared at him for one moment. Lazy. Indolent. Secure.

She sat up and straddled his hips. “It is cold. I guess we should share body heat, or something.”

Al threw back his head and laughed.


	6. Chapter 6

vi

Ivy woke to diffuse white light seeping through the blinds. The heater thrummed near the window. Al’s breath tickled her neck.

She made no effort to move, no effort to break the cage of Al’s arms that had settled around her sometime during the night. His chest was pressed up against her bare back, broad and warm, like her own personal space heater. The feel of his skin against hers was a siren’s call, even now.

Ivy looked down to where Al’s arm curved around her. She hated to admit it—hated to acknowledge anything positive about the man—but he was beautiful. Even his forearms were beautiful, corded with muscle and dusted with hair. Her mind flashed on those forearms braced on either side of her head.

Heat pooled low in Ivy’s belly, and she felt sick. Because alongside those beautiful muscles—that beautiful skin and hair and sinew, there was also a tattoo. The size of a grapefruit in a vague half circle. Indigo fading to green fading to gold.

Part of her wanted to lift her arm. To press it to his and finally see the effect of having two marks—two halves of one coin—joined. Al’s words from last night rang in her ears.

_“We’re the same.”_

Ivy buried her head in the pillow, trying to banish the words. Trying to banish the thought. For a few months, as a young girl, she’d thought that having a soulmate would be wonderful. Magical. Completing. But then she’d gone to Winterbourne and she’d learned the true nature of destiny. It was nothing more than a trap. A leash. A noose.

Al shifted behind her. His fingers trailed across her skin, and even now, it sent little shivers racing beneath her skin.

Lips brushed the back of her neck. “Good morning.”

Ivy stiffened. For a moment, she thought about closing her eyes. Pretending to be asleep.

But Al’s lips were trailing from her neck to her cheek. His hand was moving down.

“Don’t,” she said.

Al stopped. “Ivy?”

Ivy shook her head. She pulled away from him and stood up, realizing only after she’d done it that she was completely naked in the full light of day. She sucked in a breath, but barreled through it, reaching to grab her pajamas from where Al had thrown them, unceremoniously, on the ground.

And she didn’t need that image either, thank you very much.

She put on her clothing. Steeled herself. Turned around.

Al was pressed up on one elbow in the bed. The sheet he had draped across his hip somehow only served to make him look more naked. More enticing. The man looked like debauchery had been served up on a silver platter.

Except for his face.

“What’s wrong?” he said.

“Nothing,” she said. “I’m fine.”

Al raised a skeptical brow in an expression that was so familiar, so like him, that it nearly sent Ivy staggering back. “That’s why you snuck out of bed at,” he rolled slightly to check the clock, “seven am.”

“I should get dressed,” Ivy said.

“Why?” Al said.

Ivy didn’t say anything.

Al sat up. “You regret it?”

Ivy opened her mouth, and then closed it. She repeated the action, and every time, every thought she had seemed to fly straight out of her head.

It was probably because he was basically naked, she reasoned. Not at all because leaving him had made her chest ache.

Al’s eyes were still locked on hers. “I’m sorry if I… If I pushed you.”

“Don’t,” Ivy said. “You didn’t. I… I wanted it. Last night.”

Al’s blue eyes had darkened to the color of a storm. “Last night,” he said. “But not today?”

Ivy shook her head. “We’re different people, you and me. We don’t get along.”

“We did last night.”

And just like that, Ivy was reliving it. In vivid detail. His lips on her breast, his palms on her inner thighs.

Ivy’s mouth went dry. “We work together. This… whatever this was… it’s never going to work.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I do.”

Al leaned forward, then. He rested his arms on the top of his knees. “You don’t want it to work.”

Ivy looked at him then, lips twisted. “Can you blame me? You’re not… I mean, I’m not…”

She waved her hand in some vague gesture meant to encompass the two of them.

Al straightened his shoulders. He threw the sheet off and stood up, throwing the whole, stunning length of him into the bright light of morning.

“I can blame you,” he said.

He snatched his clothing from the floor, strode to the bathroom and slammed the door.

The next few months were torture.

Since that fateful day in junior year when Ivy had seen the soulmark on his arm, Ivy had kept Al at a very careful arm’s length. It wasn’t hard; after all, since they’d received the ire of the dean in freshman year, they’d been instructed to keep away from each other. To act like professionals and give each other space.

But Ivy hadn’t realized how very deliberate that professionalism had been.

Whereas Al had once been a silent coworker, greeting her occasionally, and even rarely engaging her in conversation, now he scowled whenever she walked into the room. If he could, he stood and left immediately. If he couldn’t, he glared and scoffed and derided everything Ivy said.

It hurt.

Ivy went home each night with her nerves raw and her chest aching. Her dreams tormented her with dark, luscious whispers, low voices that said “we’re the same” and “I know you” and “stay with me forever. Please.”

It didn’t seem to matter that the last statement had never left Al’s lips. Ivy heard them anyway in his stony silences. She saw them in his scowl. She felt them every time she entered a room, and he turned around and walked away.

It was a rough few months.

But summer eventually came, and with it, the opportunity for some, limited, freedom. Ivy was no longer chained to her desk grading lab reports late into the night. For once in her academic life, she had no classes to assist with at all.

So she loaded up her tablet with intriguing journal articles and took herself down to a nearby café, determined to bask in the sun.

Of course Al was there.

For a moment, Ivy thought about leaving. She thought about walking down the block, and installing herself in her usual haunt, a coffee shop with an absurd bovine mascot. But the coffee shop, while lovely, was dark as a cave. And it was a beautiful day, and the sun was shining bright.

And Al was with a girl.

Ivy didn’t recognize the tall brunette. She was pretty, though, in an understated sort of way. Her skirt—white and airy and delicate—was feminine in a way that Ivy had never managed, not even in a full-length gown in an actual ballroom.

The memory of Trent, of his rejection, still stung. Even now.

Ivy ordered tea and a scone, and then secreted herself against a wall. The server’s station, carefully stacked with glasses and pitchers of tea, formed an excellent barrier between her and her nemesis.

One that was, conveniently, devoid of servers at this precise moment.

“I’m so glad you were able to come,” Al said.

“Not as glad as I am,” the woman said. “It’s been too long.”

A silence echoed then, and though she tried to fight it, Ivy could see Al’s smile. Deep and crooked and genuine.

The server came then, offering refills and asking after their meals. The brief clank of glass on glass echoed before Al spoke again.

“I still can’t believe it,” he said.

“I understand,” the woman said.

“Do you?” Al’s tone was wry.

“Well, no,” the woman said. She laughed, and in that moment, Ivy hated the sound. The clear, ebullient laughter ringing through the café. “But I know a little about the rest of the world. And if I’d grown up where you did, I’d find it hard to believe, too.”

Al was quiet for a long moment. Ivy pictured him lifting a glass to his lips, draining it, drinking deep. She could see his long fingers on the glass. His throat working as he swallowed.

She put her head in her hands.

“Where did you grow up?” Al finally said.

“We lived in Pittsburgh.”

“Pittsburgh!”

The woman’s laugh burrowed straight into Ivy’s brain. “Don’t sound so surprised. I had a fairly normal childhood. House in the suburbs. Parents, brothers. A dog.”

“It sounds wonderful,” Al said.

Even from here, Ivy could hear the wistfulness in his voice. Her mind flashed on that night in the inn, so long ago, when he’d held her in his arms. When he’d confessed to the chaos of his childhood, to the foster homes and the juvenile detention centers. To the month he’d spent shuffling between backroom cots and acquaintances’ couches.

Ivy’s eyes pricked with tears. Of course he’d want that. He’d want a stable home. A life. A family.

Maybe a family with this woman.

Suddenly, Ivy knew she couldn’t stay. She fumbled with her wallet, throwing a twenty on the table to cover her food.

She might have escaped unnoticed, if it weren’t for the busboy. He chose just that instant to happen by with a bin full of dishes. In her haste to leave, Ivy hadn’t been paying attention. She stumbled straight into him, and he lost his grip.

The bin fell with a resounding crash.

Ivy could feel the eyes of the other diners on her. She could feel Al’s eyes on her. She forced herself not to look.

She stooped low to where the busboy was already crouching to pick up the dishes. “I’m so sorry,” she said.

“Don’t worry about it,” he said with an aggrieved sigh.

Ivy floundered around, helping him collect the largest pieces of the broken glass. The task was over all-too soon. The busboy hefted his load, and returned to the kitchen, muttering. 

Leaving Ivy no choice but to stand up.

When she did, Al was staring at her. Disdain curled his lip, and he crossed his arms. “Eavesdropping, Chance?”

“Of course not,” Ivy said, but her cheeks were already turning red.

Al’s expression could have frozen her to stone. “What did you hear?”

“I… nothing,” Ivy said. “Nothing at all.”

She glanced away from Al’s thunderous gaze, and instead, looked at the woman. The woman whose gaze wasn’t on her face.

It was on her arm.

Too late, Ivy realized that she’d forgone her cardigan today in light of the heat. Her tattoo—her soulmark—was on full display.

As was Al’s, not five feet away.

Ivy knew the expression on the woman’s face. The slow, dawning awe. She’d seen it on her aunt’s face. Then Denise’s. “Al,” the woman said, “you haven’t introduced me to your friend.”

“She’s not my friend,” Al said.

“Girlfriend?” 

Al’s sneer redirected to her. “What on earth? Why would you ask that?”

The woman frowned at Al for a moment. “You don’t know. No one’s ever told you.”

Ivy could feel her heart pounding in her throat. “Don’t,” she said to the woman. “Please.”

The woman turned an incredulous stare on her. “You know?” she asked. “You’re a…”

She trailed off, seeming to think better of saying the word aloud. On a public street.

Ivy wrapped her arms around herself, suddenly cold despite the sun. Despite the heat. “Please,” she repeated. 

The woman stared at her for a long moment, confusion writ plain across her face. “How could you not tell him?”

“Tell me what?” Al said.

He was staring at the other woman, and for one moment, one moment on the edge of insanity, Ivy wanted him to look at her. To see her the way he had once, that one night in the hotel room in the midst of the storm.

She wanted it, and she hated herself for wanting it. For needing it.

She turned and ran.

The afternoon’s heat broke in a flood of evening rain. Clouds spilled across the face of the sun, grey. Ominous. Brooding.

Ivy hid herself away on the top floor of the library. Through the wide windows in front of her table, she watched rain drench the city, turning the gutters into rivers, making the library’s fountain swell.

Al found her there, not two hours later. His hair was plastered to skin from the force of the rain. He dripped a steady flood onto the library’s floor.

_“Soulmates?”_

Ivy flinched. “It’s not what you think.”

“What I think,” Al said, “is that you knew a secret about me. A secret that you kept. That you hid from me. On purpose.”

Ivy couldn’t deny it. Her eyes flicked to his face, livid with rage, and then away. “What was I supposed to do?” she said. “What was I supposed to say? _‘Hey, by the way, we hate each other, but you’re my soulmate. Have a nice day!’_”

Al ignored the sarcasm. He sat in the seat across from her, sending water droplets spilling across the table. “How long?”

“I… what?”

“How long,” he repeated. “How long have you known about this? About us?”

Ivy winced. “Junior year.”

“_Junior…_” Al sat back. He rubbed a hand across his jaw. “Well,” he said. “_Well_.”

“It’s not…” Ivy started. Then stopped. “It wasn’t… I mean, I…”

“Spit it out,” Al said.

Ivy glared at him. “You said it yourself. We aren’t friends. We’ve never been friends. We couldn’t be soulmates. We couldn’t.”

“Except that apparently, according to this, we are.”

He shoved his arm at her. The edges of the tattoo glinted gold in the fluorescent lights.

Ivy stared at it. Her mark, her brand.

Her burden.

“You don’t understand,” she said.

“Then explain it to me. “Tell me something—anything—to make this make sense.”

“I can’t,” she said.

“Try.”

For a long moment, Ivy just stared at him. She read the anger in his eyebrows pulled together into a firm line across his forehead. She read the bewilderment in his lips, still parted slightly as if in shock. She read the desperation in his hands, splayed across the soaked table, gripping the wood as if for dear life.

Ivy sat back in her chair. She looked at the ground, and for a long moment, she said nothing. The words wouldn’t come.

“Ivy.”

She looked up. Al was still gripping the table, still leaning forward, but his gaze had gone softer. “Just tell me the truth,” he said. “For once.”

The words stung. But then, Ivy deserved them. She’d lied to him. She’d kept this from him. For years.

“When I first got the mark,” she said. “I was confused. I grew up in a normal family. I didn’t know about soulmarks. I didn’t know about any of it.”

She waved a hand, as if that could encompass the vast world of magic and mystery she’d inherited from her father. Learned at the elbow of her aunt.

“Really?” Al said.

“Really,” Ivy said. “My father was the… well, you know. My mother wasn’t. I grew up with her.”

“When did you find out?”

“About the mark?” Ivy shrugged. “When it appeared. I was sixteen. My aunt—that’s my father’s sister—told me what it was.”

Al waited for Ivy to speak. But it seemed as though the words had gotten stuck. “And then?”

“I was a teenage girl,” Ivy said. “Secretly, I loved the idea of a perfect love. Preordained and destined. But then I found out that destiny is as much as a shackle as much as a gift.”

She dared to look up at Al, then. He swallowed hard. “That night,” he said. “In the snowstorm, I told you… I thought it felt like fate.”

“Maybe it was,” Ivy said, lifting a shoulder. “Maybe there’s some divine hand guiding it all. Guiding all of us. Isn’t it terrifying?”

Al sat back. He rubbed his jaw again, and Ivy couldn’t help but follow the motion with her eyes. She’d peppered kisses there once.

Her lips burned.

“I never wanted it,” Ivy said. “Not the tattoo, not the soulmate. I never wanted—”

She broke off then, a guilty flush rising to her cheeks.

Al finished the thought. His voice dripped with disdain. “You never wanted me.”

The flush deepened, but Ivy didn’t deny it. “We don’t get along,” she said. “We fight constantly.”

“No, we don’t,” Al said. “Not in years.”

Ivy gaped at him. “And what have we been doing these past four months?”

Al’s lips twisted. “That’s different.”

“How?”

“Because you rejected me,” he said. He shifted in his chair. “Ivy, that night… it was good.”

Ivy snorted. “Good?”

Al shot her a glare. “Do you really need me to stroke your ego right this second? It was good. It was great. I felt…”

He trailed off, and Ivy felt a fissure form deep within her chest. She’d felt it too, whatever it was.

“I didn’t want you to leave,” Al said. “I wanted you to stay. Hell, I would have gladly skipped the conference if I knew I could stay in bed with you.”

His eyes found hers, and a wave of heat swept down to her belly.

Ivy did her best to ignore it. “Don’t you see? That’s the problem. That morning, when I got up, when I left you… it was the hardest thing I’d ever done. But I had to do it.”

“Why?”

“Because I wanted the choice to be mine,” Ivy said. “I didn’t want to be forced into it by a freak snowstorm and a shared bed. I didn’t want to be lured and seduced just because you looked like… you.”

She waved her hand again. She expected Al to make a joke, about handsomeness or irresistibility or what have you, but when she looked up, he was staring down at the table. Tracing the edge of it with those big, warm palms.

“You don’t want me.”

“I don’t… I mean, it’s not…” Ivy clutched at her throat. “Don’t make it personal.”

“We certainly don’t want a discussion about soulmates to be personal.”

“That’s not… I meant, don’t make it about you,” Ivy said. Then she added, more softly. “It’s not about you. It’s about the concept of you.”

Al’s eyes lifted to her then. He’d always had honest eyes. Reading him had always been easy, since the first day he’d held the door for her and insulted her in the lobby of Allen Hall. Al had always worn his emotions on his sleeve, whether it was anger or arrogance or smugness. She’d thought the arrogance was the worst; the curled lip and the relaxed posture and the absolute, unwavering assurance that he was better than you.

But now, Al’s eyes shone with pain.

It was easily the worst thing Ivy had ever seen, a punch to the gut and a knife to her throat all rolled up into one. He’d been angry for months, and somehow, the anger had been easier to bear. Easier to ignore, even if it was her fault.

The fine hairs at Al’s temples were drying in the cold air conditioning of the library. They floated away from his face. “All this time,” he said, “all these years. And you’ve never once asked me what I wanted. What would make me happy. Even now, when we’re being honest for the first time in years—maybe ever—and we’re still talking about you.”

Guilt burned in Ivy’s chest. She felt tears welling in the corners of her eyes, and she blinked them back before they could fall. “What do you want?” she said. “What would make you happy?”

Al rapped his knuckles on the table. He stared into the middle distance, unseeing. “If you’d asked me that a year ago, I might have said you. Four months ago, I definitely would have. Three months ago, I was pissed, but the answer still would have been yes. But now…”

He lifted a shoulder. His eyes finally slid to Ivy’s, and the pain was gone. They were utterly cold. Utterly blank.

“Now I don’t think I ever want to see you again.”

“Al,” Ivy whispered.

He shook his head. He stood, then, flipping damp hair out of his face. “I’m done with this, Ivy. I’m done with you. Let’s go back to the way it was. You’ll ignore me. I’ll ignore you. Everyone will be a lot happier in the end.”

“Al,” Ivy said again.

But he held up a hand. Without another word, he turned on his heel and left.

Ivy listened to the cool, melodic ding of the elevator doors opening. She heard Al’s boots, still wet, squeak forward. She heard the doors roll shut. Then, and only then, did she finally let the tears fall.

Al’s last words—maybe the last he’d ever speak to her—were still running through her mind, like a tape stuck on repeat. She wanted to rail against the very idea of him ignoring her. She pictured him passing her in the hallway and casually, deliberately, emotionlessly stepping aside. There would be no careful offers of coffee. No snide comments about how she graded the new students too easily. She’d sit in the shared office of the TA’s lounge with him, day after day, and be met with silence. Stony. Hard. 

It would hurt. It would hurt far more than the way his lip had curled every time he’d seen her in the past four months. It would hurt far more than every mocking headshake and every angry rant. It would hurt much more than that morning four months ago, when she’d pulled herself from the safety of his arms.

She heard the bathroom door slamming again in her head, a counterpoint to the elevator’s gentle chime.

_No_, she thought. _No_.

She was on her feet before she realized it, racing for the stairs. The flights flew past until she was bursting through the stairwell door and out into the lobby, past the disgruntled librarian and out into the courtyard in front of the library. Rain still poured from the sky, pelting Ivy’s head and shoulders, but she didn’t stop. She didn’t turn back.

She spotted Al about a block away. His shoulders were hunched.

“Al!” she shouted. “Al!”

The rain pounded on the pavement in a driving symphony, a cacophonous roar. But Al heard her. He stiffened where he stood, shoulders pulling back.

He didn’t turn around.

Ivy raced for him, skirting around the overflowing fountain, over a hedge, and onto the sidewalk. Her feet slipped on the pavement in her sandals, but it didn’t seem to matter. Nothing seemed to matter.

Except for him.

“Al,” she said. “Wait!”

Raindrops rolled down his face. Night and rainfall turned his brown hair black. “What?”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m so sorry. Sorry for not telling you. Sorry for fighting with you. Sorry for ignoring you, and resenting you, and leaving you. I’m sorry.”

Al’s expression was pinched. “Ivy…”

“No,” she said. “Wait. Please. This wasn’t about you, this was never about you, and if you think it was, if you think it was a rejection, you’re wrong. I never hated you. Not even back in freshman year when I was a little shit, and you pushed all my buttons.”

“Ivy.”

“No,” she said. The words were tumbling out now, one after another like she’d let loose some sort of flood. She could see the resignation in his shoulders, and it lit a fire deep within her, a fire deep enough to push back the cold of the rain. “I was terrible to you. I’ve been terrible to you for years. No matter how much I want to, I can’t change that. I can’t change the past. But we can start again. We can have a new future. I want a new future.”

Rain poured between them. Al stared at her for a long, long time. Ivy expected him to turn her away. To yell or to scream, or to simply turn on his heel and walk away. But when he spoke, he said one word. Clipped. Impatient.

Desperate.

“Why?”

“Because I feel terrible when you’re not around,” Ivy said. “Because I miss you. Your sarcasm and your insults. Your surprising, quiet kindness that you hide as much as you let out. I miss debating idiotic things with you in the TA’s office. I miss getting wound up over arguments that mean nothing in the long run. I miss everything. I miss you.”

Al didn’t say anything. Ivy raced to fill the silence.

“I never should have left you that morning,” Ivy said. “I didn’t want to, but I did, and I’m sorry. I should have stayed. I should have told you about the marks. About who you were to me. But I was afraid. I’m still afraid, but I’m here now. I’m here, and you’re here, and god, I hate begging, but I’ll beg, Al, I will. Please don’t shut me out. Please don’t make me do this alone.”

“You’re not alone,” he said. “You have a family. A mother. A crazy aunt.”

“I don’t have you.”

The words were broken. One last, sobbing plea.

Al stepped forward, then. Raindrops sluiced down his chin and onto her forehead. “I don’t even know where we go from here,” he said.

“Neither do I,” Ivy said. She grasped his lapels. “But we’ll figure it out.”

Ivy wasn’t sure who moved first. But the next thing she knew, Al’s lips were on hers, a shock of heat amid the cold rain.

It ended almost as quickly as it had started. Ivy fisted her hands in Al’s shirt. “Please,” she said. “Please don’t leave me.”

Al’s hands settled on her hips. He lifted her chin. In the last light of daylight, Ivy thought she saw something shining in his eyes. “You really want me?”

She dragged his face down to hers. “Yes, you idiot,” she said. “I really do.”

Hesitation lingered on Al’s face. Ivy couldn’t stand it. She pressed up onto her toes, towering over him for half a second. “I love you, Al Madeline,” she said. “And you have no choice in the matter.”

He barked a laugh, then. His arms slid around her, pulling her close. “Really?”

She kissed him, then. Long and deep and true. Rain pounded down onto the pavement around them. Rivulets of cold water slid down Ivy’s spine.

“Really,” Ivy said. She reached up and pushed a lock of wet hair out of Al’s eyes. “Take me back. Please.”

Al’s smile was a slow thing, but it grew. It spread. One hand slid slowly up Ivy’s back. “Okay. We’ll give it a try.”

They kissed in the rain, beneath the opening heavens until night finally fell. Until three cars had honked. Until the head librarian ambled out and threatened to spray them with the hose, ‘not that it would do any good.’

Ivy laughed.

And Al smiled.


	7. epilogue

epilogue

Ivy peeked out from behind the velvet curtains on the side of the stage. Through the harsh glare of the lights, she spied a familiar shock of red hair that might have been her aunt. The drone of scientists—hundreds of them—was almost loud enough to surpass the pounding of her heart.

“I can’t do this,” she said.

“Relax,” Al said. He leaned against a black-painted wall, reading from his own notes. “You’re going to do fine.”

“I’m going to throw up. Why did I let you talk me into this?”

“Because you love me,” Al said, “and you know I’m always right.”

Ivy turned to glare at him. “You are still as insufferable as the day I met you.”

A grin pulled at Al’s lips, and he finally looked up from his notes. “You love me.”

Ivy put her hands on her hips. “God only knows why.”

In response to that, Al set his notes down. He crossed the space between them and stole a kiss. It was, as always, a full body experience. Ivy’s breath caught and her toes curled and she dug her fingers into his hair.

When Al stopped, Ivy’s head was spinning. “Did that remind you?”

“Maybe,” Ivy allowed.

She felt Al’s laugh rumble through her from the place where their chests were pressed together.

One of the conference planner’s aides found them that way, still wrapped up together. “Dr. Chance? You have about a minute before you go on.”

“Oh!” Ivy said. “Right.” She pulled away then, straightening her jacket. She checked her hair in a tiny makeup mirror hidden against the back wall.

Her lipstick was gloriously smeared. “This was your evil plan all along, wasn’t it?”

Al arched an eyebrow at her. A glorious, beautiful eyebrow. “It was my plan that got you here in the first place. Without me, you’d be out there in the audience. And the prize—and the acclaim—would be mine.”

Ivy rolled her eyes as she finished blotting at her lipstick with a tissue. “You wish, Madeline.”

“I know,” he said, casually picking up his notes. “Give it your best shot, Chance. I’ll be following right on your heels.”

“Is that a promise?” she asked.

He grinned at her. “Always.”

On stage, the speaker called her name. The crowd broke into applause.


End file.
